A Free Man of Color Read online

  He looked around the courtyard again.

  There were other “Indians” present, of course, among the vast route of Greek gods and cavaliers, Ivanhoes and Rebeccas, Caesars and corsairs. The Last of the Mohicans was as popular here as it was in Paris. January recognized Augustus Mayerling, one of the town’s most fashionable fencing masters, surrounded by a worshipful gaggle of his pupils, and made a mental note to place bets with his sister when he saw her on how many duels would be arranged tonight. In all his years of playing the piano at New Orleans balls, January had noticed that the average of violence was lower for the quadroon balls, the Blue Ribbon Balls, than for the subscription balls of white society.

  And even on this night of masks, he noted that those who spoke French did not mingle with those who spoke English. Some things Carnival did not change.

  He’d laughed about that, too, in Paris, back when there’d been reason to laugh.

  Don’t think about that, he told himself, and opened the service door. Just get through this evening. I wonder if that poor girl …?

  She was standing in the service hall that led to the manager’s tiny office, to the kitchen and the servants’ stair.

  At the sound of the opening door she whirled, her face a pale blur under the mask and the streaks of war paint. She’d been watching through the little door that led into the corner of the lobby, and for a moment, as she lifted her weight up onto her toes, January thought she’d flee out into the big room, into which he could not follow. He noted, in that instant, how absurdly the cheap buckskin costume was made, with a modern corset and petticoat beneath it, and a little beaded reticule at her belt. Her dark plaits were a nod to Monsieur Cooper, but she wore perfectly ordinary black gloves, much mended, and black slippers and stockings, splashed with mud from the street.

  She seemed to lose her nerve about the lobby and turned to flee up the narrow stair that led to the upstairs supper room and the little retiring chamber beside it, where girls went to pin up torn flounces. January said, “It’s all right, Mademoiselle. I just wanted to be sure you were all right.”

  “Oh. Of course.” She straightened her shoulders with a gesture he knew—he’d seen it a hundred times, or a thousand, but not from an adult woman.… “Thank you, Monsieur Janvier. The man was … importunate.” She was trying to sound calm and a little arrogant, but he saw from the way the gold buckskin of her skirt shivered that her knees were still shaking. She nodded to him, touched her absurd headdress, loosing another two cock feathers, and started to walk past him toward the courtyard again. It was well done and, he realized later, took nerve. But when she came close January got a better look at what he could see of her face and knew then where he had seen that squaring of the shoulders, those full lips; knew where he had heard that voice.

  “Mademoiselle Madeleine?”

  She froze, and in the same moment realization took hold of him, and horror.

  “Mademoiselle Madeleine?”

  Her eyes met his, her mouth trying for an expression of cool surprise and failing. She was a woman now, wasp-waisted with a soaring glory of bosom, but the angel-brown eyes were the eyes of the child he remembered.

  She moved to dart past him but he put his body before the door, and she halted, wavering, tallying possible courses of action, even as he’d seen her tally them when her father would come in after the piano lessons and ask whether she would like a lemon ice before her dancing teacher arrived.

  Mostly, January remembered, she would ask, “Might we play another piece, Papa? It’s still short of the hour.”

  And old René Dubonnet would generally agree. “If it’s no trouble for Monsieur Janvier, ma chère. Thank you for indulging her—would you care for some lemon ice as well, when you’re done, Monsieur?”

  Not an unheard-of offer from a white Frenchman to his daughter’s colored music master, but it showed more than the usual politeness. Certainly more politeness than would be forthcoming even from a Frenchman these days.

  He realized he didn’t know what her name was now. She must be all of twenty-seven. If she hadn’t spoken he might not have known her, but of course she had known him. He and the waiters in their white coats and the colored croupiers in the gaming rooms were the only men in the building not masked.

  All this went through his mind in a moment, while she was still trying to make up her mind whether to deny that she knew him at all or to deny that she was the child who had played modern music with such eerie ferocity. Before she could come to a decision he gestured her to the empty office of the Salle’s master of ceremonies and manager, one Leon Froissart, who would be safely upstairs in the ballroom for some time to come. Had he been in Paris January might have taken her arm, for she was trembling. But though she must be passing herself as an octoroon—and there were octoroons as light as she—as a black man he was not to touch her.

  Only white men had the privilege of dancing, of flirting with, of kissing the ladies who came to the Blue Ribbon Balls. The balls were for their benefit. A man who was colored, or black, freeborn or freedman or slave, was simply a part of the building. Had he not lost the habit of keeping his eyes down in sixteen years’ residence in Paris, he wouldn’t even have looked at her face.

  She left a little trail of black cock feathers in her wake as she preceded him into the office. The room was barely larger than a cupboard, illumined only by the rusty flare of streetlights and the glare of passing flambeaux that came in through the fanlight over the shutters; the cacophony of brass bands and shouting in the street came faintly but clearly through the wall.

  She said, still trying to bluff it through, “Monsieur Janvier, while I thank you for your assistance, I …”

  “Mademoiselle Dubonnet.” He closed the door after a glance up and down the hall, to make sure they were unobserved. “Two things. First, if you’re passing yourself as one of these ladies, some man’s plaçée or a woman looking to become one, take off your wedding ring. It makes a mark through the glove and anyone who takes your hand for a dance is going to feel it.”

  Her right hand flashed to her left, covering the worn place in the glove. She had big hands for a woman—even as a little girl, he remembered, her gloves had always been mended on the outside edge, as these were. Maybe that was what had triggered the recollection in his mind. As she fumbled with the faded kid he went on.

  “Second, this isn’t anyplace for you. I know it isn’t my place to say so, but why ever you’re here—and I assume it’s got something to do with a man—go home. Whatever you’re doing, do it some other way.”

  “It isn’t …” she began breathlessly, but there was guilty despair in her eyes, and he held up his hand for silence again.

  “Some of these ladies may be as light as you,” he continued gently, “but they were all raised to this world, to do things a certain way. They mostly know each other, and they all know the little tricks—who they can talk to and who not. Who each other’s gentlemen are and who can be flirted with and who left alone. Even the young girls, with their mothers bringing them here for the first time for the men to meet, they know all this. You don’t. Go home. Go home right now.”

  She turned her face away. She had always blushed easily, and he could almost feel the color spreading under the feathered rim of the mask. He wondered if she’d grown up as beautiful as she’d been when he taught her pianoforte scales, simple bits of Mozart, quadrilles and the rewritten arias on which he got his students used to the flow and the story of sound. She had a wonderful ear, he recalled; those hands that tore out the sides of her gloves could span an octave and two. He remembered how she’d attacked Beethoven, devouring the radical music like a starving woman eating meat, remembered the distant, almost detached passion in her eyes.

  Horns blatted and drums pounded in the street, as a party of maskers rioted by. Someone yelled “Vive Bonaparte! À bas les américains!” What was it now? Ten years? Twelve years since the man’s death? And he was still capable of starting riots in the street. �
�Salaud!” “Crapaud!” “Athéiste!” “Orléaniste …!”

  He saw the quicksilver of tears swimming in her eyes.

  “I’m telling you this for your own protection, Mademoiselle Dubonnet,” he said. “If nothing else, I know these girls. They gossip like cannibals cutting up a corpse. You get recognized, your name’ll be filth. You know that.” He spoke quietly, as if she were still the passionate dark-haired child at the pianoforte, who had shared with him the complicity of true devotees of the art, and for a moment she looked away again.

  “I know that.” Her voice was tiny. From his pocket January drew one of the several clean handkerchiefs he always carried, and she took it, smudging her war paint a little in the process. She drew a deep breath, let it go, and raised her eyes to his again. “It’s just that … there was no other way. My name is Trepagier now, by the way.”

  “Arnaud Trepagier?” His stomach felt as if he’d miscalculated the number of steps on a stairway in the dark.

  He’d heard his sister’s friends gossip about the wives and the white families of the men who bought them their houses, fathered their children, paid for their slippers and gowns. For any white woman to come, even masked, even protected by the license of Carnival, to a Blue Ribbon Ball was hideous enough. But for the widow of Arnaud Trepagier to be here, dressed like Leatherstocking’s worst nightmare less than two months after her husband’s body had been laid in the Trepagier family crypt at the St. Louis cemetery …

  She would never be received anywhere in the parish, anywhere in the state, again. Her husband’s family and her own would cast her out. The Creole aristocracy was unforgiving. And once a woman was cast out, January knew, whether here or in Paris, there was almost nothing she could do to earn her bread.

  “What is it?” he asked. She had never been stupid. Unless she had fallen in love with intense and crazy passion, it had to be something desperate. “What’s wrong?”

  “I have to speak with Angelique Crozat.”

  For a moment January could only stare at her, speechless and aghast. Then he said, “Are you crazy?”

  He’d only been back in New Orleans for three months, but he knew all about Angelique Crozat. The free colored in their pastel cottages along Rue des Ramparts and Rue Claiborne, the French in their close-crowded town houses, and the Americans in their oak-shaded suburbs where the cane fields had been—the slaves in their cramped outbuildings and attics—knew about Angelique Crozat. Knew about the temper tantrums in the cathedral, and that she’d spit on a priest at Lenten confession last year. Knew about the five hundred dollars’ worth of pink silk gown she’d ripped from bosom to hem in a quarrel with her dressmaker, and the bracelet of diamonds she’d flung out a carriage window into the gutter during a fight with a lover. Knew about the sparkle of her conversation, like bright acid that left burned holes and scars in the reputations of everyone whose name crossed her lips, and the way men watched her when she passed along the streets.

  “I must see her,” repeated Madame Trepagier levelly, and there was a thread of steel in her voice. “I must.”

  The door opened behind them. Madeleine Trepagier’s eyes widened in shock as she stepped around Froissart’s desk, as far from January as the tiny chamber would permit. January’s mind leaped to the soi-disant Cardinal Richelieu, and he turned, wondering what the hell he would do in the event of another assault—in the event that someone guessed that Madame Trepagier was white, alone here with him, to say nothing of the woman she was seeking.

  But it was only Hannibal Sefton, slightly drunk as usual, a wreath of flowers and several strings of iridescent glass Carnival beads looped around his neck. “Ball starts at eight.” His grin was crooked under a graying mustache, and with alcohol the lilt of the well-bred Anglo-Irish gentry was stronger than usual in his speech. “Like as not Froissart’ll fire your ass.”

  “Like as not Froissart knows what he can do with my ass,” retorted January, but he knew he’d have to go. He’d been a performer too long not to begin on time, not only for the sake of his own reputation but for those of the other men who’d play in the ensemble. Managers and masters of ceremonies rarely asked who was at fault if the orchestra was late.

  He turned back to Madame Trepagier. “Leave now,” he said, and met the same quiet steeliness in her eyes that he had seen there as a child.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I beg you, don’t betray me, but this is something I must do.”

  He glanced back at Hannibal, standing in the doorway, his treasured fiddle in hand, and then back at the woman before him. “I can leave,” offered Hannibal helpfully, “but Froissart’ll be down here in a minute.”

  “No,” said January, “it’s all right.”

  Madeleine Trepagier’s face was still set, scared but calm, like a soldier facing battle. She’d never survive, he thought. Not if La Crozat guessed her identity.…

  “Listen,” he said. “I’ll find Angelique and set up a meeting between you at my mother’s house, all right? I’ll send you a note tomorrow.”

  She closed her eyes, and some of the tension left her shoulders and neck; she put out a hand to the corner of the desk to steady herself. She too, realized January, had heard everything there was to hear about Angelique Crozat. A deep breath, then a nod. Another black cock feather floated free, like a slow flake of raven snow.

  “All right. Thank you.”

  They left her in the office, Hannibal checking the corridor, right and left, before they ducked out and hastened up the narrow, mildew-smelling flight of the service stair. In the hall January retrieved another cock feather from the bare cypress planks of the floor, lest Richelieu happen by and be of an observant bent. With luck once the music started everyone would be drawn up to the ballroom, and Madame Trepagier could slip away unnoticed. It shouldn’t be difficult to hire a hack in the Rue Royale.

  Didn’t I tell myself fifteen minutes ago, ‘Let’s not do this again’? An interview with Angelique Crozat—spiteful, haughty, and so vain of the lightness of her skin that she barely troubled herself to treat even free colored like anything but black slaves—a clout in the mouth from Cardinal Richelieu promised to be mild in comparison. At least being struck was over quickly.

  “Who’s the lady?” asked Hannibal, as they debouched into the little hall that lay between the closed-up supper room and the retiring parlor.

  “A friend of my sister’s.” The parlor door was ajar, showing the tiny chamber drenched in amber candlelight, its armoire bulging with costumes for the midnight tableaux vivants and two girls in what was probably supposed to be classical Greek garb stitching frantically on a knobby concoction of blue velvet and pearls.

  “In case you’ve forgotten, that kind of tête-à-tête’s going to get you shot by her protector, and it probably won’t do her any good, either.”

  They passed through an archway into the lobby at the top of the main stair. The open stairwell echoed with voices from below as well as above, a many-tongued yammering through which occasional words and sentences in French, Spanish, German, and Americanized English floated disembodied, like leaves on a stream. Pomade, roses, women, and French perfumes thickened the air like luminous roux, and through three wide doorways that led into the long gas-lit ballroom, only the smallest breath of the night air stirred.

  Hannibal paused just within the central ballroom door to collect a glass of champagne and a bottle from the bucket of crushed New England ice at the buffet table. One of the colored waiters started to speak, then recognized him and grinned.

  “You fixin’ to take just the one glass, fiddler?”

  Hannibal widened coal-black eyes at the man and passed the glass to January, ceremoniously poured it full, and proceeded to take a long drink from the neck of the bottle.

  “Oh, for a beaker full of the warm South,

  Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.

  With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

  And purple-stainéd mouth.”

  He solemnly tou
ched the bottle to January’s glass in a toast, and resumed his progress toward the dais at the far end of the ballroom. January collared two more glasses for Jacques and Uncle Bichet, who awaited them behind the line of potted palmettos. The waiter shook his head and laughed, and went back to pouring out champagne for the men who crowded through the other doorways from the lobby, clamoring for a last drink before the dancing began.

  As he settled at the piano—a seven-octave Erard, thick with gilt and imported at staggering cost from Paris—and removed his hat and gloves, January thought he caught a glimpse of the creamy buff of a buckskin gown in the far doorway. He swung around, distracted, but the shifting mosaic of revelers hid whoever it was he thought he’d seen.

  Concern flared in him, and anger, too. Damn it, girl, I’m trying to keep you from ruining yourself! His hands passed across the keys, warming up; then he nodded to Hannibal and to Uncle Bichet, and like acrobats they bounded into the bright strains of the Marlboro Cotillion. First thoughts were best—I’m getting too old to be a knighterrant. His lip smarted and he cringed inwardly at the thought of seeking out and interviewing Angelique Crozat later in the evening.

  And for what? So that she could come up here anyway …

  But why would she come up? He’d seen her relax at the thought that she didn’t have to find the woman herself, saw the dread leave her.

  He’d probably been mistaken.