A Free Man of Color Read online

  Minou narrowed her cat-goddess eyes. “She wants herself to be perfect,” she said. “But she’d always rather the girls around her were just a little flawed. Look at her friendship with Clemence Drouet—who might stand some chance of marrying a nice man if she’d quit trying to catch a wealthy protector. She designs Clemence’s dresses.… Well, look at her.”

  She nodded toward the narrow-shouldered girl who stood in deep conversation with the fair young man in gray, and January had to admit that her dress, though beautiful and elaborately frilled with lace, accentuated rather than concealed the width of her hips and the flatness of her bosom.

  “She designed the gowns for all the girls in her tableau,” went on Dominique in an undertone. “I haven’t seen them finished, but I’ll bet you my second-best lace they make Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose look as terrible as Clemence’s does her.”

  “She’s that spiteful?” It was a trick January had heard of before.

  Dominique shrugged. “She has to be the best in the group, p’tit. And the two Maries are younger than she is.” She nodded toward Agnes Pellicot, a regal woman in egg yolk silk and an elaborately wrapped tignon threaded with ropes of pearls, now engaged in what looked like negotiations with a stout man clothed in yet another bad version of Ivanhoe. Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose stood behind and beside her, slim girls with abashed doe eyes.

  They must be sixteen and fifteen, thought January—he recalled Agnes had just borne and lost her first child when he had departed for France—the same age, probably, at which Madeleine Dubonnet had been married to Arnaud Trepagier.

  And in fact, he reflected, there wasn’t that much difference between that match and the one Agnes was clearly trying to line up with Ivanhoe. They were technically free, as Madeleine Dubonnet had been technically free, marrying—or entering into a contract of plaçage—of their own free choice. But that choice was based on the knowledge that there was precious little a woman could do to keep a roof over her head and food on her table except sell herself to a man on the best terms she could get. Why starve and scrimp and sell produce on the levee, why sew until your fingertips bled and your eyes wept with fatigue, when you could dress in silk and spend the larger part of your days telling servants what to do and having your hair fixed?

  A girl has to live.

  Then Angelique Crozat stepped into the ballroom, and January understood the iciness in his sister’s voice.

  True, a girl must live. And even the most beautiful and fair-skinned octoroon could not go long without the wealth of a protector. That was the custom of the country.

  And true, the social conventions that bound a white woman so stringently—to coyness and ignorance before marriage, prudishness during, and hem-length sable veils for a year if she had the good fortune not to die in childbed before her spouse—did not apply to the more sensual, and more rational, demimonde.

  But it was another matter entirely to appear at a ball in the dazzling height of Paris fashion two months after her lover was in his tomb.

  Her gown was white-on-white figured silk, simply and exquisitely cut. Like Dominique’s it swooped low over the ripe splendor of her bosom and like Dominique’s possessed a spreading wealth of sleeve that offset the close fit of the bodice in layer after fairylike layer of starched lace.

  But her face was covered to the lips in the tabbied mask of a smiling cat, and the great cloud of her black hair, mixed with lappets of lace, random strands of jewels, swatches of red wigs, blond curls, and the witchlike ashy-white of horsetails—poured down like a storm of chaos over her shoulders and to her tiny waist. Fairy wings of whalebone and stiffened net, glittering with gems of glass and paste, framed body and face, accentuating her every movement in a shining aureole. She seemed set apart, illuminated, not of this world.

  A triple strand of pearls circled her neck, huge baroques in settings of very old gold mingled with what looked like raw emeralds, worked high against the creamy flesh. More strands of the barbaric necklace lay on the upthrust breasts, and bracelets of the same design circled her wrists, and others yet starred the primal ocean of her hair.

  Fey, brazen, and utterly outrageous, it was not the costume of a woman who mourns the death of her man.

  The young man in gray left Clemence Drouet standing, without a word of excuse, and hastened toward that glimmering flame of ice. He was scarcely alone, for men flocked around her, roaring with laughter at her witticisms—“What, you on your way to a duel?” of an armored Ivanhoe, and to a Hercules, “You get that lion skin off that fellow down in the lobby? Why, your majesty! You brought all six of your wives and no headsman? How careless can you be? You may need that headsman!”

  In spite of himself, January wanted her.

  The young man in gray worked himself through the press toward her, holding out his hands. She saw him, caught and held his gaze, and under the rim of the cat’s whiskers the red lips curved in a welcoming smile.

  Timing is everything. And quite deliberately, and with what January could see was rehearsal-perfect timing, just as the boy was drawing in breath to speak, Angelique turned away. “Why, it’s the man who’d trade his kingdom for a horse.” She smiled into the eyes of the dazzled Roman and, taking his hand, allowed him to lead her onto the dance floor.

  As they departed, she smiled once more at the boy in gray.

  It was as neat and as cruel a piece of flirtation as January had seen in a lifetime of playing at balls, and it left the boy openmouthed, helpless, clenching and unclenching his fists in rage. Leon Froissart, a fussy little Parisian in a blue coat and immaculate stock, bustled over with a young lady and her mother in tow—Agnes must be ready to spit, thought January, seeing that neither Marie-Anne nor Marie-Rose was present in the ballroom at that moment—and performed an introduction, offering the girl’s gloved hand. The boy shoved it from him and raised his fist, Froissart starting back in alarm. For an instant January thought the boy really would strike the master of ceremonies.

  Then at the last minute he flung himself away, and vanished into the crowd in the lobby.

  Shaking his head, January swung into the Lancers Quadrille.

  By the dance’s end, when he was able once more to pay attention to the various little dramas being enacted in the ballroom, Agnes Pellicot had been rejoined by her two daughters, and it was blisteringly clear that Minou’s predictions concerning Angelique’s use of her design skills had been correct. Marie-Anne and Marie-Rose were both clothed now in gowns quite clearly designed to complement Queen Titania’s moondust skirts and shimmering wings, and just as clearly designed to point up the older girl’s awkward height, and the sallow complexion and rather full upper arms of the younger. Both girls were confused and on the verge of tears, knowing they looked terrible and not quite knowing why, and Agnes herself—no fool and considerably more experienced in dressmaking—seemed about to succumb to apoplexy.

  Languishing, giggling, smiling with those dark eyes behind the cat mask, Angelique dispatched Marc Anthony to fetch her champagne and vanished into the lobby, the tall tips of her wings flickering above the heads of the crowd.

  “I’ll be back,” said January softly and rose. Hannibal nodded absently and perched himself on the lid of the pianoforte as Uncle and Jacques disappeared in quest of negus. As January wove and edged his way reluctantly through the crowd toward the doors, a thread of music followed him, an antique air like faded ribbon, barely to be heard.

  Best do it now, he thought. The picture of the doll-like six-year-old in his mother’s front parlor returned to his mind, lace flounced like a little pink valentine, clutching the weeping Minou’s half-strangled kitten to her and shaking away January’s hand: “I don’t have to do nothing you say, you dirty black nigger.”

  And Angelique’s mother—that plump lady in the pink satin and aigrettes of diamonds now chatting with Henry VIII, rather like a kitten herself in those days—had laughed.

  The Creoles had a saying, Mount a mulatto on a horse, and he’ll deny his mother w
as a Negress.

  Angelique was at the top of the stairs, exchanging a word with Clemence, who came up to her with anxiety in her spaniel eyes; she turned away immediately, however, as a rather overelaborate pirate in gold and a blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe claimed her attention with offers of negus and cake. January hesitated, knowing that an interruption would not be welcome, and in that moment the boy in gray came storming up and grabbed hard and furiously at the fragile lace of Angelique’s wing.

  She whirled in a storm of glittering hair, ripping the wing still further. “What, pulling wings off flies isn’t good enough for you these days?” she demanded in a voice like a silver razor, and the boy drew back.

  “You b-bitch!” He was almost in tears of rage. “You … stuh-stuh-strumpet!”

  “Oooh.” She flirted her bare shoulders. “That’s the b-b-best you can do, Galenette?” Her imitation of his stutter was deadly. “You can’t even call names like a man.”

  Crimson with rage, the boy Galen raised his fist, and Angelique swayed forward, just slightly, raising her face and turning it a little as if inviting the blow as she would have a kiss. Her eyes were on his, and they smiled.

  But her mother swooped down on them in a flashing welter of jewels, overwhelming the furious youth: “Monsieur Galen, Monsieur Galen, only think! I beg of you …!”

  Angelique smiled a little in triumph and vanished into the dark archway of the hall with a taunting flip of her quicksilver skirts.

  “A girl of such spirit!” the mother was saying—Dreuze, January recalled her name was, Euphrasie Dreuze. “A girl of fire, my precious girl is. Surely such a young man as yourself knows no girl takes such trouble to make a man jealous unless she’s in love?”

  The boy tore his eyes from the archway into which Angelique had vanished, gazed at the woman grasping him with her little jeweled hands as if he had never seen her in his life, then turned, staring around at the masked faces that ringed him, faces expressionless save for those avid eyes.

  “Monsieur Galen,” began Clemence, extending a tentative hand.

  Galen struck her aside, and with an inchoate sound went storming down the stairs.

  Clemence turned, trembling hands fussing at her mouth, and started for the archway to follow Angelique, but January was before her. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, when their paths crossed in the mouth of the hallway, “I have a message for Mademoiselle Crozat.”

  “Oh,” whispered Clemence, fluttering, hesitant. “Oh … I suppose …”

  He left her behind him, and opened the door.

  “How dare you lay hands on me?”

  She was standing by the window, where the light of the candles ringed her in a halo of poisoned honey. Her words were angry, but her voice was the alluring voice of a woman who seeks a scene that will end in kisses.

  She stopped, blank, when she saw that it wasn’t Galen after all who had followed her into the room.

  “Oh,” she said. “Get out of here. What do you want?”

  “I was asked to speak to you by Madame Trepagier,” said January. “She’d like to meet with you.”

  “You’re new.” There was curiosity in her voice, as if he hadn’t spoken. “At least Arnaud never mentioned you. She can’t be as poor as she whined in her note if she’s got bucks like you on the place.” Behind the cat mask her eyes sized him up, and for a moment he saw the disappointment in the pout of her mouth, disappointment and annoyance that her lover had had at least one $1,500 possession of which she had not been aware.

  “I’m not one of Madame Trepagier’s servants, Mademoiselle,” said January, keeping his voice level with an effort. He remembered the flash of desire he had felt for her and fought back the disgust that fueled further anger. “She asked me to find you and arrange a meeting with you.”

  “Doesn’t that sow ever give up?” She shrugged impatiently, her lace-mitted hand twisting the gold-caged emeralds, the baroque pearls against the white silk of her gown. “I have nothing to say to her. You tell her that. You tell her, too, that if she tries any of those spiteful little Creole tricks, like denouncing me to the police for being impudent, I have tricks of my own. My father’s bank holds paper on half the city council, including the captain of the police, and the mayor. Now you …”

  Her eyes went past him. Like an actress dropping into character, her whole demeanor changed. Her body grew fluid and catlike in the sensual blaze of the candles, her eyes smoky with languorous desire. As if January had suddenly become invisible, and in precisely the same tone and inflection in which she had first spoken when he came in, she said, “How dare you lay hands on me?”

  January knew without turning that Galen Peralta stood behind him in the doorway.

  It was his cue to depart. He was sorely tempted to remain and spoil her lines but knew it wouldn’t do him or Madeleine Trepagier any good. And Peralta would only order him out in any case.

  The boy was trembling, torn between rage and humiliation and desire. Angelique moved toward him, her chin raised a little and her body curving, luscious. “Aren’t we a brave little man, to be sure?” she purred, and shook back her outrageous hair, her every move a calculated invitation to attack, to rage, to the desperate emotion of a seventeen-year-old.

  Stepping past the ashen-faced boy in the doorway, January felt a qualm of pity for him.

  “You … you …” He shoved January out of his way, through the door and into the hall, and slammed the door with a cannon shot violence that echoed all over the upstairs lobby.

  It was the last time January saw Angelique Crozat alive.

  THREE

  Bitch, thought January, his whole body filled with a cold, dispassionate anger. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

  Anger consumed him, for the way she had looked at him, like a piece of property, and at the knowledge that this woman had flitted and cut and stolen her way through the life of the woman who had once been Madeleine Dubonnet. That for one moment he had wanted her—as probably any man did who saw her—disgusted him more than he could say. His confessor, Père Eugenius, would probably call it repentance for the Original Sin, and he was probably right.

  Back in the ballroom, major war appeared to have broken out.

  January heard the shouting as he crossed the upstairs lobby, which was completely deserted, men and women crowding the three ballroom doors. Monsieur Bouille’s shrill accusations rode up over the jangling background racket of a brass band playing marches in the street outside. “A swine and a liar, a scum not fit to associate with decent society.…”

  Granger, thought January wryly. Bouille had used precisely the same wording in his latest letter to the Bee.

  “You call me a liar, sir? Deny if you will that you helped yourself to bribes from every cheapjack railway scheme—”

  “Bribery may be how you Americans do business, sir, but it is not the way of gentlemen!”

  “Now who’s the liar?”

  There was a roar and a surge of the crowd, and Monsieur Froissart’s helpless voice wailing, “Messieurs! Messieurs!”

  January slipped unnoticed along the back of the crowd, to where Hannibal, Uncle Bichet, and Jacques were sharing a bottle of champagne behind the piano. He had never played a white subscription ball that hadn’t included beatings with canes, pistol whippings or kicking matches in the courtyard or the gaming rooms—So much, he thought wryly, for the vaunted Creole concept of “duels of honor.” If it wasn’t a Bonapartist taking out his spite on an Orléaniste, it was a lawyer assaulting another lawyer over personal remarks exchanged in the courtroom or a physician challenging another physician following a lively fusilade of letters in the newspapers.

  “Wagers now being taken.” Hannibal poured out a glass of champagne for him. “Jacques here insists it’ll be swords.…”

  “ ’Course it’ll be swords,” argued the cornetist. “Bouille spends half what he earns at Mayerling’s salle des armes and he’s crazy to try it out! He’s been challenging everyone he meets to duels!”

&nb
sp; January shook his head, and sipped the fizzy liquid. “Pistols,” he said.

  “Pistols? Where’s your élan?”

  “Americans always use pistols.”

  “Told you,” said Uncle Bichet to Jacques.

  On the whole, the quadroon balls were far better run. January wondered whether that had something to do with the fact that these men didn’t legally control their mistresses the way they did their wives and so had to make a better impression on them, or if the simple social pressure of Creole families caused the men to drink more.

  “Live pigs at thirty paces,” decreed Hannibal solemnly, and gestured with a crawfish patty. “Arma virumque cano … Did you encounter La Crozat?”

  “Monsieur Bouille, you forget yourself and where you are.” Over the heads of the crowd—and January could look over the heads of most crowds—he saw a snowy-bearded, elderly gentleman in the dark blue satins of fifty years ago interpose himself between William Granger and Jean Bouille, who were squared off with canes gripped clubwise in their hands.

  “I do not forget myself!” screamed Bouille. “Nor who I am. I am a gentleman! This canaille has insulted me in public, and I will have my satisfaction!”

  Granger inclined his head. His accent was a flatboat man’s twangy drawl but his French was otherwise good. “When and where you please, sir. Jenkins …”

  The Roman soldier stepped forward, putting up a nervous hand to steady his laurel wreath as he inclined his head.

  “Would you be so good as to act for me?”

  “Only think!” wailed Monsieur Froissart. “I beg of you, listen to Monsieur Peralta’s so sensible words! Surely this is a matter that can be regulated, that can be talked of in other circumstances.”

  The city councilman sneered contemptuously and lifted his cane as if fearing his opponent would turn tail; Granger returned the look with a stony stare and spat in the direction of the sandbox. Froissart looked frantically around him for support, and at the same moment January felt a touch on his shoulder. It was Romulus Valle, the ballroom’s majordomo.