A Free Man of Color Read online

  He hoped he’d been mistaken.

  Men were leading their ladies in from the lobby, forming up squares. Others came filtering through the discreetly curtained arch that led to the passageway from the Théâtre next door, greeting their mistresses with kisses, their men friends with handshakes and grins of complicity, while their wives and fiancées and mothers no doubt fanned themselves and wondered loudly where their menfolk could have got to.

  The custom of the country.

  January shook his head.

  All of Madeleine Trepagier’s family, and her deceased husband’s, were probably at that ball. He’d never met a Creole lady yet who didn’t have brothers and male cousins. True, if they didn’t know she’d be here they wouldn’t be expecting to see her, but there was always the risk. With luck the first dances—cotillion, waltz, Pantalon—would absorb their attention, giving the woman time to make her escape.

  If that was what she was going to do.

  The skipping rhythms of the cotillion drew at his mind. He knew that for the next hour, music would be all he’d have time to think about. Whatever she decided to do, she’d be on her own.

  It was her own business, of course, but he had been fond of her as a child, the genius and the need of her soul calling to the hunger in his. She had to be desperate in the first place to come here. Quiet and well-mannered and genuinely considerate as she had been as a child, she had had the courage that could turn reckless if driven to the wall. He wished heartily that he’d had time to escort her back to the Trepagier town house himself.

  He was to wish it again, profoundly, after they discovered the body in the parlor at the end of the hall.

  TWO

  Benjamin January’s first public performance on the piano had been at a quadroon ball. He was sixteen and had played for the private parties and dances given during Christmas and Carnival season by St.-Denis Janvier for years; he was enormously tall even then, gawky, lanky, odd-looking, and painfully shy. St.-Denis Janvier had hired for him the best music master in New Orleans as soon as he’d purchased—and freed—his mother.

  The music master was an Austrian who referred to Beethoven as “that self-indulgent lunatic” and regarded opera as being on intellectual par with the work hollers Ben had learned in his first eight years in the cane fields of Bellefleur Plantation where the growing American suburb of Saint Mary now stood. The Austrian—Herr Kovald—taught the children of other plaçées and seemed to think it only the children’s due that their illegitimate fathers pay for a musical as well as a literary education for them. If he ever thought it odd that Ben did not appear to have a drop of European blood in his veins it was not something he considered worthy of mention.

  Ben was, he said quite simply, the best, and therefore deserved to be beaten more, as diamonds require fiercer blows to cut. Common trash like pearls, he said, one only rubbed a little.

  Herr Kovald had played the piano at the quadroon balls, which in those days had been held at another ballroom on Rue Royale. Then, as now, the wealthy planters, merchants, and bankers of the town would bring their mulatto or quadroon mistresses—their plaçées—to dance and socialize, away from the restrictions of wives or would-be wives; would also bring their sons to negotiate for the choice of mistresses of their own. Then, as now, free women of color, plaçées or former plaçées, would bring their daughters as soon as they were old enough to be taken in by protectors and become plaçées themselves, in accordance with the custom of the country. Society was smaller then and exclusively French and Spanish. In those days the few Americans who had established plantations near the city since the takeover by the United States simply made concubines of the best looking of their slaves and sold them off or sent them back to the fields when their allure faded.

  At Carnival time in 1811, Herr Kovald was sick with the wasting illness that was later to claim his life. As if the matter had been discussed beforehand, he had simply sent a note to Livia Janvier’s lodgings, instructing her son Benjamin to take his place as piano player at the ball. And in spite of his mother’s deep disapproval (“It’s one thing for you to play for me, p’tit, but for you to play like a hurdy-gurdy man for those cheap hussies that go to those balls …”), he had, as a matter of course, gone.

  And, except for a break of six years, he had been a professional musician ever since.

  The ballroom was full by the time the cotillion was done. January looked up from his music to scan the place from the vantage point of the dais, while Hannibal shared his champagne with the other two musicians and flirted with Phlosine Seurat, who had by this time discovered that powdered wigs and panniers were designed for the stately display of a minuet, not the breathtaking romp of a cotillion. Between snippets of Schubert, played to give everyone time to regain their breaths, January tried again to catch sight of Madeleine Trepagier—if that was she he had thought he’d glimpsed in the ballroom doorway—or of Angelique Crozat, or, failing either of them, his sister Dominique.

  He knew Minou would be here, with her protector Henri Viellard. During the four years between Dominique’s birth and January’s departure for Paris, he had known that the beautiful little girl was destined for plaçage—destined to become some white man’s mistress, as their mother had been, with a cottage on Rue des Ramparts or des Ursulines and the responsibility of seeing to nothing but her protector’s comfort and pleasure whenever he chose to arrive.

  The practical side of him had known this was a good living for a woman, promising material comfort for her children.

  Still, he was glad he’d been in Paris when his mother started bringing Minou to the Blue Ribbon Balls.

  He caught sight of her just as he began the waltz, a flurry of pink silk and brown velvet in the wide doorway that led to the upstairs lobby, unmistakable even in a rose-trimmed domino mask as she grasped the hands of acquaintances, exchanged kisses and giggles, always keeping her alertness focused on the fat, fair, bespectacled man who lumbered in at her side. Viellard appeared to have been defeated by the challenge of accommodating his spectacles to the wearing of a mask—he was clothed very stylishly in a damson-colored cutaway coat, jade-green waistcoat, and pale pantaloons, and resembled nothing so much as a colossal plum. When the waltz was over Dominique fluttered across the dance floor to the musicians’ stand, holding out one lace-mitted hand, a beautiful amber-colored girl with velvety eyes and features like an Egyptian cat’s.

  “First I heard Queen Guenevere had her dresses made from La Belle Assemblée.” Benjamin gestured to the fashionable bell-shaped skirt, the flounced snowbank of white lace collar, and the sleeves puffed out—Dominique had recently assured him—on hidden frameworks of whalebone and swansdown. Like every woman of color in New Orleans she was required to wear a tignon—a head scarf—in public, and had used the license granted by a masked ball to justify a marvelous confection of white and rose plumes, of wired and pomaded braids, of stiffened lace dangling with tasseled lappets of rose point in every direction, the furthest thing from the grace of Camelot that could be imagined.

  Women these days, January had concluded, wore the damnedest things.

  “Queen Guenevere is for the tableaux vivants, silly. And I’m just appallingly late as it is—you can’t get any kind of speed out of waiters during Carnival, even in a private dining room—and I’ve just found out Iphègénie Picard doesn’t have her costume for our tableau finished! Not,” she added crisply, “that she’s alone in that. Iphègénie was telling me—”

  “Is Angelique Crozat here?” In the three months he’d been back in New Orleans, January had learned that the only way to carry on a conversation with Dominique was to interrupt mercilessly the moment the current appeared to be carrying her in a direction other than the one intended.

  She said nothing for a moment, but the full lips beneath the rim of the mask tightened slightly, and the chill was as if she’d imported a chunk of New England ice to cool the air between them. “Why on earth do you want to talk to Angelique, p’tit? Which
I wouldn’t advise, by the way. Old man Peralta has been negotiating with Angelique’s mama—for his son, you know, the one who doesn’t have a chin—and the boy’s crazy with jealousy if any other man so much as looks at her. Augustus Mayerling’s had to pull him out of two duels over her already, which he hasn’t any right to be getting into—Galen, I mean—because of course negotiations are hardly begun …”

  “I need to give her a message from a friend,” said January mildly.

  “Better write it on the back of a bank draft if you want her to read it,” remarked Hannibal, coming around to lean on the corner of the piano. “In simple words of one syllable. You ever had a conversation with the woman? Very Shakespearean.”

  Reaching out, he extracted two of the plumes from Dominique’s hat and twisted his own long hair into a knot on the back of his head, sticking the quill ends through like hairpins to hold it in place. “Full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.” Dominique slapped at his hands but gave him the flirty glance she never would have given a man of her own color, and he hid a grin under his mustache and winked at her, thin and shabby and disreputable, like a consumptive Celtic elf.

  “I haven’t had the pleasure,” said January wryly. “Not recently anyway, though she did call me a black African nigger when she was six. But I’ve heard conversations she’s had with others.”

  “I’ve done that two streets away.”

  “She’ll be here.” Dominique’s tone was still reminiscent of the ominous drop in temperature that precedes a hurricane. “And I don’t think you’ll find her manners have improved. Not toward anyone who can’t do anything for her, anyway. Well, I understand a girl has to live, and I don’t blame her for entertaining Monsieur Peralta’s proposals, but …”

  “What’s wrong with Peralta?” January realized he’d run aground on another of those half-submerged sandbars of gossip that dotted New Orleans society—Creole, colored, and slave—like the snags and bars of the river. One day, he knew, he’d be able to negotiate them as he used to, unthinkingly—as his mother or Dominique did—identifying Byzantine gardens of implication from the single dropped rose petal of a name. But that would take time.

  As other things would take time.

  In any case he couldn’t recall any scandal connected with that dignified old planter.

  “Nothing,” said Dominique, surprised. “It’s just that Arnaud Trepagier has only been dead for two months. Arnaud Trepagier,” she went on, as January stared at her in blank dismay, his mind leaping to the fear that she had somehow recognized Madeleine, “was Angelique’s protector. And I think—”

  “Filthy son of a whore!”

  All heads turned at the words, ringingly declaimed. There was, January reflected, something extremely actor-like in the way the dapper little gentleman in trunk hose and doublet had paused in the archway that led through to the more respectable precincts next door, holding the curtains apart with arms widespread and raised above the level of his shoulders, as if unconsciously taking up as much of the opening as was possible for a man of his stature.

  The next second all heads swiveled toward the object of this epithet, and there seemed to be no doubt in anyone’s mind who that was. Even January spotted him immediately, by the way some people stepped back from, and others closed in behind, the tall and unmistakably American Pierrot who’d been spitting tobacco in the courtyard earlier in the evening.

  For an American, he spoke very good French. “Better a whore’s son than a pimp, sir.”

  Waiters and friends were closing in from all directions as the enraged Trunk Hose strode into the ballroom, raising on high what appeared to be the folded-up sheets of a newspaper as if to smite his victim with them. A pirate in purple satin and a gaudily clothed pseudo-Turk in pistachio-green pantaloons and a turban like a pumpkin seized Trunk Hose by the arms. Trunk Hose struggled like a demon, neither ceasing to shout epithets nor repeating himself as they and the sword master Mayerling hustled him back through the curtain to the Théâtre d’Orléans again. The American Pierrot only watched, dispassionately stroking his thin brown mustache beneath the rim of his mask. A Roman soldier, rather like a bonbon in gilt papier-mâché armor, emerged from the passageway, flattening to the side of the arch to permit the ambulatory Laocoön to pass, then crossed to Pierrot in a swirl of crimson cloak. Pierrot made a gesture that said, It’s what I expected.

  Hannibal tightened a peg and touched an experimental whisper from the fiddle strings. “I’ll put a dollar on a challenge by midnight.”

  “You think that Granger’s gonna hang around wait for it?” demanded Uncle Bichet promptly. Whose uncle Uncle had originally been no one knew—everyone called him that now. He was nearly as tall as January and thin as a cane stalk, claimed to be ninety, and had old tribal scarring all over forehead, cheekbones, and lips. “I say by the time Bouille shakes free of his family over in the other hall Granger’s out of here. And where you gonna get a dollar anyway, buckra?”

  “And let people say he ran away?” contradicted Jacques unbelievingly. “I say eleven.”

  “That’s William Granger?” Like everyone else who’d been following the escalating war of letters in the New Orleans Bee, January had pictured the railway speculator as, if not exactly a tobacco-spitting Kaintuck savage, at least the sort of hustling American businessman who came to New Orleans on the steamboats with shady credit and a pocket full of schemes to get rich quick. That might, he supposed, be the result of the man’s spelling, as demonstrated in his letters to the Bee’s editor, or the speed with which his accusations against the head of the city planning council had degenerated from allegations of taking bribes and passing information to speculators in rival railway schemes to imputations of private misconduct, dubious ancestry, and personal habits unsuited to a gentleman, to say the least.

  Not that Councilman Bouille’s rebuttals had been any more dignified in tone, particularly after Granger had accused him of not even speaking good French.

  January shook his head, and slid into the bright measures of Le Pantalon. The crowd swirled, coalesced, divided into double sets of couples in a rather elongated ring around the walls of the long ballroom. Creole with Creole, American with American, foreign French with foreign French.… Bonapartist with Bonapartist, for all he knew.

  He saw the young Prussian fencing master emerge from the passageway to the other ballroom, the offending newspaper tucked under one arm, and scan the crowd, like a scar-faced, beak-nosed heron in Renaissance velvet and pearls. The purple pirate stepped through the curtain behind him and conferred with him rapidly—a silk scarf covered the corsair’s hair but nothing in the world could prevent his copper-colored Vandyke from looking anything but awful in contrast. Then Mayerling moved off through the crowd to speak with Granger, who had clearly brushed aside the encounter and was asking Agnes Pellicot if one of her daughters would favor him with a dance.

  Agnes looked him up and down with an eye that would have killed a snap bean crop overnight and made excuses. January had heard his mother remark that her friend would have her work cut out for her to successfully dispose of Marie-Anne, Marie-Rose, Marie-Thérèse, and Marie-Niege, but Kaintucks were Kaintucks.

  Her own protector having crossed over to join his fiancée in the Théâtre, Phlosine Seurat waved, and Mayerling joined her in a set with a very young, fair, chinless boy in a twenty-dollar gray velvet coat.

  The tide of the music drew January in—the “tour des mains,” the “demi promenade,” the “chaine anglaise”—and for a time it, and the joy of the dancers, was all that existed for him. Hidden within the heart of the great rose of music, he could forget time and place, forget the sting of his cut lip and the white man who’d given it to him, who had the right by law to give it to him; forget the whole of this past half year. For as long as he could remember, music had been his refuge, when grief and pity and rage and incomprehension of the whole of the bleeding world overwhelmed him: It had been a retreat, like the gentle hypnotism of the Rosar
y. With the gaslight flickering softly on the keys and the subliminal rustle of petticoats in his ears, he could almost believe himself in Paris again, and happy.

  As a medical student he had played in the dance halls and the orchestras of theaters, to pay his rent and buy food, and after he had given up the practice of medicine at the Hôtel Dieu, music had been his living and his life. It was one of his joys to watch the people at balls: the chaperones waving their fans on the rows of olive-green velvet chairs, the young girls with their heads together giggling, the men talking business by the buffet or in the lobby, their eyes always straying to the girls as the girls’ eyes strayed toward them. January saw the American Granger stroll over to the lobby doors to talk to the gilt Roman, controlled annoyance in the set of his back. Something about the way they spoke, though January could hear no words, told him that the Roman was American as well—when the Roman spat tobacco at the sandbox in the corner he was sure of it. Uneasiness prickled him at the sight of them. He neither liked nor trusted Americans.

  The young man in the gray coat likewise made his way to the lobby doors, looked out uneasily, then gravitated back to the small group of sword masters and their pupils. Mayerling and Mâitre Andreas Verret were conversing in amity unusual for professional fencers, who generally quarreled at sight; their students glared and fluffed like tomcats. Gray Coat orbited between the group and the doors half a dozen times, fidgeting with his cravat or adjusting his white silk domino mask. Waiting for someone, thought January. Watching.

  “Drat that Angelique!” Dominique rustled up to the dais with a cup of negus in hand. “I swear she’s late deliberately! Agnes tells me two of her girls need final adjustments in their costumes for the tableau vivant—they’re Moth and Mustardseed to Angelique’s Titania—and of course Angelique’s the only one who can do it. It would be just like her.”

  “Would it?” January looked up from his music, surprised. “I’d think she’d want her group to be perfect, to show her off better.”