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  “Agnes Pellicot is living on investments that have gone down in value and has three daughters besides Marie-Therese to bring out.”

  Needless to say, the sister January referred to was not the lovely Dominique but Olympe, his full-blood sister who’d run off with the voodoos at the age of sixteen.

  They traversed the passageway to the upstairs lobby of the Salle, and emerging, January scanned the room for Dominique: cautiously, because a black musician who was perceived as “uppity” – that is, attending a ball designed for white men in some capacity other than that of a servant – was just as liable to be thrashed on this side of the passageway as on the other. Music still flowed like a sparkling river through the archways that led from the ballroom, and with it the swish of skirts, the brisk pat of slippers on the waxed floor, the laughter of the ladies and the rumble of men’s talk. Impossible to tell whether his sister would be able to gracefully slip from her protector – or whether she’d remember to do so. In ten minutes he’d have to be back...

  A moment later, however, Dominique appeared in the archway, a fantasia of green and bronze, calling back over her shoulder, “Darling, if I don’t get some air I’ll be obliged to faint in your arms and that would simply destroy the flowers you gave me—”

  January took his untouched champagne glass, picked a waiter’s silver tray from a corner of the buffet in the lobby, and carried the glass to her with the respectful air of one who knows his place. “Would madame care for champagne?”

  “How precious of you, p’tit! What I’d really like is about a quart of arsenic to give to Eulalia Figes – such a witch! She said my dress…”

  “Were you able to find out about Nicholas Saverne?” January had learned years ago that if one truly needed specific information, ruthlessly interrupting Dominique’s digressions upon her friends and acquaintances wsa the only way to get it.

  “Oh, a perfect chevalier, dearest. He speaks French like a Parisian, he sends to Paris for his boots – he really does, p’tit, Nathalie Grillot’s mother checked – Bourdet makes his coats, the best in town, but it’s all show. Maman Grillot – and Agnes Pellicot – both looked into his finances when he seemed to be showing an interest in Nathalie and in Marie-Therese, and learned that he’s always borrowing from somewhere-or-other to invest in lands that he turns around and mortgages to invest in steamboat shares, but at the bottom he’s not worth the horseshoes on a dead horse. And he owes money to God and all His saints – to every shirtmaker and tobacconist and hatmaker in town. But men are impressed – bankers, and investors, I mean, and tavernkeepers, who’re the ones who control votes. Henri’s mama—” Henri was Dominique’s protector, son of the truly formidable Widow Viellard – says Nicholas Saverne tries even harder to impress the Americans, and that he’s spoken of running for Congress.”

  “He may well succeed,” remarked Hannibal, returning from a trip to the unguarded buffet, a bottle of champagne in hand. As a white man – albeit an outcast – he ran less of a risk for helping himself. “Americans seem to be impressed by the show of wealth and aren’t as careful about checking on a man as Mama Grillot and Agnes Pellicot.”

  “Handsome?” January asked.

  Dominique shrugged coquettishly. “If you like all your goods in the shop window.”

  “Does Marie-Zulieka love him?”

  The young woman’s eyes lost their surface brightness as her delicate brows tugged together; from playful bubbliness, her expression shifted, thoughtful and a little sad. “I don’t think Zozo really loves anyone… except Lucie, of course, and that frightful old tutor of hers, M’sieu Vouziers. One would think when a girl’s finished with her governess’s lessons she’d be glad to toss her books into the river – Heaven knows I was. But when has any man stopped courting a pretty girl just because she tells him she isn’t interested? He always thinks he can make her interested. And if that girl’s about to be pushed into an arrangement with the likes of Jules Dutuille—”

  “What’s wrong with Jules Dutuille?”

  “He drinks,” responded Dominique promptly. “Oh, all men drink, of course – I think they’d go insane if they couldn’t…”

  “I certainly would,” put in Hannibal.

  “Well, all you do when you drink is recite poetry nobody understands, and then fall asleep, cher.” Dominique reached over to pat Hannibal’s thin cheek. “You’re very sweet about it. You don’t say cruel things, or destroy one’s letters from one’s family, or kill one’s pets… My maid’s sweetheart’s cousin is a maid in Dutuille’s household, you see, and anyway everyone knows about Dutuille.”

  “I don’t.”

  “That’s because you’re serious and hard-working and have no time for idle chatter in the cafés.” She flashed him a dazzling smile, which sobered again at the recollection of things she had heard. “He never lets his wife see her family – they live up in St. Francisville — nor his son’s wife; they go in terror of his rages. He’s tried three or four times, to come to an arrangement with a mistress, but Babette Figes begged her mother not to conclude the contract with him, and so did Cresside Morisset. Only Zozo couldn’t refuse him, you see, because her father was in business with him. So yes, she could have run off with Nicholas, only I don’t think she did.”

  “Why not?” asked January, curious, though it was a conclusion he’d already arrived at.

  Dominique shrugged again. “Because if she had she’d have taken her jewels, silly! That appalling ruby parure is worth over a thousand dollars! With his debts, he’d never have let her pass up that chance. On the other hand…”

  She hesitated, and January finished softly, “On the other hand, Nicholas might have thought himself justified under the circumstances in slipping poison into Marie-Therese’s coffee himself, and kidnapping Zozo, guessing she’d go without a fuss.”

  The young woman nodded. “I think that’s what her mama fears.”

  “And if she didn’t take her jewels,” he continued, “which are worth a thousand dollars, there’s no telling when Nicholas might decide that once Marie-Zulieka has run off to Mobile with him, she herself is worth fifteen hundred dollars.”

  Dominique’s eyes widened. The thought had clearly never crossed her mind. “Oh, no,” she breathed. “No, p’tit, he wouldn’t…”

  “Don’t underestimate what a white man would or wouldn’t do, when there’s money involved, and a woman not of his own race,” said January quietly. “One more thing, and then we have to get back to the ballroom. Is Nicholas Saverne here tonight?”

  Dominique silently shook her head.

  *

  “I don’t understand,” said Hannibal, some hours later when next the Theatre musicians had a break. “Your sister and her friends are free women, aren’t they? If Jules Dutuille is such a blackguard – and I must say in the defense of us devotees of Dionysus that a man needn’t be a drunkard to treat women like cattle – Marie-Zulieka can say no. Her mother might put up a fuss – God knows my aunts did when a cousin of mine refused to marry a chinless Viscount who would have paid off my uncle’s gambling-debts – yet there’s no way she or anyone can force her compliance.”

  January was silent for a few moments, reflecting on the width of the gulf that even after several years’ residence, still separated the shabby Irish fiddler from the world of New Orleans. Even Dominique, raised in the free colored demimonde, was separated from the world of her brother and her older sister Olympe, who remembered what it was to be slaves. The narrow brick corridor to which they’d retreated – it led to the kitchen quarters of the Salle d’Orleans – was at least warm. From it, he and Hannibal could look across the rear courtyard to the lighted windows both of the Salle and, beyond, to those of the Theatre where the well-bred French and Spanish Creole ladies were still pretending their vanished husbands and brothers were “out having a smoke” or “down in the gambling-rooms.” Another world.

  Another universe.

  “Your cousin is white,” he said at last. “And presumabl
y lives in a land where law applies to everyone. Maybe the law isn’t always just, and maybe it’s not enforced equally, but it is recognized to apply. You have to understand, that nothing that concerns the free colored here in New Orleans is legally clear, or as it seems to be. Rules change with a few degrees difference in the color of a woman’s skin. They shift from one hour to the next, from one house to the next. It’s all the custom of the country, and nothing that concerns us – slaves, or ex-slaves, or the children or grandchildren of ex-slaves – is official or truly legal or truly illegal.

  “Casmalia Rochier and her children are legally free. But since she isn’t legally married to Louis Rochier, he can make things far more difficult for her and her family than your uncle could ever make things for your aunt. It isn’t simply a matter of Uncle Freddy going to the spunging-house. Rochier has it in his power to end the education of the boys, possibly to sell Casmalia’s servants – the yard-man and the cook. If he’s angry enough to cast Casmalia off it would be disaster for the family. Free or not, there was no question of the girl not agreeing to become the mistress of anyone her father ordered her to. And no one who matters to him – none of his white relatives or acquaintances – will think or say a thing about it.”

  The fiddler opened his mouth to say something – probably along the lines of, Would a man do that to his own children? – and closed it. The lights of the Salle’s kitchen, where the other three musicians joked and laughed with the cook and waiters who served both Salle and Theatre, reflected in the dark of his eyes. Reflected the recollection, January guessed, of the number of Englishmen and Americans and Irishmen and Frenchmen they’d both known in their lives, who were capable of doing exactly those things to even their legitimate families, let alone their mistresses and bastards.

  Some white men of January’s acquaintance loved and cared for their “Rampart Street families,” their “alligator eggs,” as tenderly as they did their white wives and white children.

  Some didn’t.

  The difference was that for the libres, there was neither legal, nor social, recourse.

  No wonder women like his mother, and Agnes Pellicot, and Bernadette Metoyer, made damn sure the money was in the bank and in their own names.

  In time, Hannibal asked, “Do you think Nicholas Saverne kidnapped this girl?”

  January shook his head. “He might have, but I doubt it.”

  “Then where is she?”

  A clamor of voices from the kitchen broke his thought. Uncle Bichet, who played the bull-fiddle, called out, “Gotta get back to the ballroom, boys, ‘fore old Davis has an apoplexy and fires the lot of us.”

  January extended a hand down, to help Hannibal to his feet. “I think I know; by noon tomorrow I’ll be sure.”

  *

  Though Nicholas Saverne wasn’t at either the respectable Théâtre ball that night, or the quadroon festivities next door, Louis Rochier attended both. January observed him on those occasions when he was in the Théâtre with his wife and daughters, a square pink-faced man with an incongruous cupid-bow mouth. Most of the time, however, Rochier spent in the Salle d’Orleans with his mistress Casmalia, with his son and the other men of the New Orleans business community who likewise either had mistresses or simply liked to flirt with lively ladies.

  After the whites went home – and French Creoles were notorious for the lateness of their dancing – January and the other musicians drifted down the passageway and sat in with their colleagues in the Salle’s little orchestra until nearly four, when the quadroon ladies and their patrons finally, as they said, “broke the circle” and headed home. Rochier had sent his white family home in the carriage; January saw the tension as the man spoke with Casmalia, and guessed that the banker had demanded where his daughter was, and had been fobbed off with a lie.

  It was still pitch-black, and thickly foggy, when January returned home. Dim clamor still drifted from the wharves along the levee, and the gambling-rooms of Rue Royale, but as he walked along the Rue Burgundy the stillness was eerie, thick with the molasses reek of burnt sugar from the plantations along the Bayou Road, and the cold-stifled stench of the gutters. At his mother’s house, Bella the cook was already starting the kitchen fires. She sniffed in disdain – like her mistress Bella had little use for musicians – but gave him a cup of coffee and bread-and-butter, before he went upstairs to his garconiere to change clothes. She didn’t even come to the glowing kitchen door when he came down again a few minutes later, and crossed to the passway beside the house that led back to the street.

  The house itself was silent, and dark.

  Walking downriver along Rue Burgundy, January had almost reached Rue Esplanade when he realized he was being followed. In the fog it would be a waste of tiime to glance behind him, even when he passed the intersections where the city’s iron lanterns hung on chains across the streets. To stop and look back would let his pursuer know that he’d been detected, though January was almost certain who it was. He turned down Rue Ursulines, and then along Rue Dauphine, and still his own footfalls on the wet brick banquettes were echoed by the muted drip-drip of following boot-heels. Lantern-light up ahead outlined the dark shape of a man washing down the banquette ahead of him: Country Ned, that would be, he guessed, Mâitre Passebon the perfumier’s yard-man.

  As he came even with the old man January called out a greeting in the sloppy gombo French of the cane-fields, the half-African patois that the tutors his mother’s patron had hired for him in childhood had never quite been able to beat from his memory. “Got a buckra hound-doggin’ – you be a mama partridge for a dollar?” he said. “No ewu—” He used one of the several African words for danger, and the tribal scars on Country Ned’s face twisted their patterns with his grin.

  “Shit, Ben, ewu just fluff up my feathers.” He took the proffered dollar, passed his broom to January and walked off down the street without breaking the rhythm of January’s steps. January himself continued to scrape the broom on the bricks, and swept himself back into the moist dark of the carriage-way from Passebon’s courtyard as the pursuer solidified out of the fog.

  That it was Nicholas Saverne on his heels, January had never had a doubt. Casmalia’s yard-man Tommy might have told the young lawyer that Marie-Zulieka was being hunted by the big piano-player, or the maid might have given that information, for fifty cents or just because they sympathized with any girl who’d flee from an “arrangement” with Jules Dutuille: it didn’t matter. As Saverne passed through the ravelly blotch of lantern-light that had illuminated Country Ned’s sweeping, January identified the blink of expensive watch-fobs, the sharp cut of M’sieu Bourdet’s tailoring and the varnished shine of Parisian boots. He’d meant to wait til Saverne’s footfalls died away into the distance before himself emerging from his hiding-place and circling around in the opposite direction, but at a guess Country Ned stopped too soon.

  While January was still waiting in the carriage-way, he heard Saverne stop, then come striding back, fast. He turned to duck down the carriage-way and into the dark yard but the yellow light veered and jerked as the lantern was snatched up from the pavement where it had rested, and a voice called out, “You, boy, stop!”

  Since Saverne almost certainly knew who he was anyway, January halted, stood waiting in the high brick arch for the white man to stride up to him, Country Ned’s lantern in hand. “Are you Janvier?” He used the familiar address tu – as most white Frenchmen did, to children, pets, or slaves. One day January supposed he’d get used to being called that again.

  “I am.”

  “Have you found her?”

  January folded his hands, replied, “No, sir, I have not.”

  “You’re lying.” A white man would have called another white man out for the words – a custom January had always regarded as perfectly insane. “Where’d you be going at this hour, if not to her?”

  “I guess I’m going home, sir.”

  Saverne’s cane came up, the instinctive gesture of a man who doesn’t
take even respectfuly-phrased impudence from niggers; January steeled himself to take the blow rather than risk escalating the violence by warding it off. But when he didn’t flinch, Nicholas Saverne stopped, as if the idiocy of assaulting the one man who might possibly help him penetrated his shapely skull and golden hair. He stood for an instant, his mouth hard with frustrated anger, struggling with the idea that there were things a black man – or any man – could not be forced to do.

  The rage died out of his eyes. The cane came down. “You know where she is?” Though he still used tu, his tone had changed, as if he spoke to a fellow-man, of whom one must ask, rather than casually command. “Where she might be?”

  He pulled a wallet from his pocket, fished coins from it that flickered gold in the oily orange light. January remained standing with his hands folded, and neither reached for nor looked at the proffered money.

  Saverne lowered his hand. “Don’t tell me you agree with that harpy mother of hers, that’d turn her over to a – a boar-pig like Dutuille. Talk about pearls to swine! What do you want, then, to take me to her?”

  “Her word that it’s what she wants.”

  For one instant, January thought the young man was going to snap, Girls don’t know what they want! There was certainly something of the kind on his lips as he drew in breath, then let it out again.

  January said nothing.

  After a moment, slowly, the young man said, “Girls – sometimes they let themselves be pushed, by their families and their friends. Make no mistake, Janvier: I love that girl. And she loves me, I know she does. I will treat her like a princess, like a queen; I’m not a rich man now, but I will be one day soon. She will never have cause to regret it, if she comes back to Mobile with me. I swear that to you. I swear that to her, if you speak to her.”