“We’re taking off our blinders,” said Zach, his gaze drifting slowly over the sweating, sun-dappled, multihued crowd that surged in and around this place known popularly as Congo Square.
It was a Sunday afternoon and they had come here, to this dusty parcel of scraggly grass and spreading sycamore trees, where the city’s slaves gathered once a week in their Sunday best to dance and play and make quick, furtive love. Not everyone here was a slave, of course. Many were gens de couleur libres, free people of color. And there were white people, too, drawn by the food and the music and the general relaxed air of gaiety.
Hamish had stopped to gape at a wooden rooster on a pole, its bright ribbons fluttering in the breeze. Now he turned his head to give Zach a blank stare. “Come again?”
“Think about it,” said Zach. “This is a city of some one hundred and seventy thousand people. Of those, something like eleven thousand are free people of color, and about as many more are black or colored slaves.”
“Yeah.” Hamish made a little rolling motion through the air with his hands. “And?”
“The gatekeeper at the St. Louis Cemetery tells us about two black men, and all we can think about is maybe asking them if they saw anything. We’re told a woman with a heavy French accent drives herself out to the Bayou Crevé and betrays Philippe de Beauvais, and we immediately ask, who was it, his wife, or his aristocratic lover?”
“If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, then all I got to say is, that lieutenant out on the Bayou Crevé, he might not be the brightest lad out of Philadelphia, but even he would have noticed if the lady in question had been black. Blinders or no blinders.”
“Would he? He said she was wearing a veil, and you know she’d have had on gloves. Hell, this city is full of quadroons and octaroons with skin no darker than mine, and more than enough money to afford silken gowns and stylish carriages. And most of them speak French.”
Hamish put up a hand to smooth his mustaches, his expression quietly thoughtful. Around them, the crowd surged suddenly, for at the far end of the Square, drums had begun to beat in time to the rattle of jawbones and the thump of a tambourine, sending out a rhythm that seemed to pulse through the mass of people. There would be dancing soon, strange, savage gyrations of half-naked, leanly muscled black bodies. They weren’t all black, the onlookers already forming a circle, their hands clapping, shoulders swaying in time to that primitive tempo. But white, black, or colored, there was no denying that most of the people here had at least this one thing in common: They were all speaking French. Yankees were tolerated because they must be, but it was well-known that nègres américains, American blacks, were not welcome here.
“Take a good look sometime at the people you see living in those little Creole cottages on the edges of the Vieux Carré, or along the streets of the inner faubourgs like Tremé and Marigny,” said Zach, his voice barely audible above the weirdly exotic call of a wooden horn. “Take a good look, and notice how many are dusky women with pale-skinned children. They call it plaçage. White men, keeping colored women, having children by them. It’s a venerable institution here. Old, and venerable.”
“What are you suggesting?” said Hamish, his face suddenly, oddly flushed. “That de Beauvais had a French-speaking colored mistress stashed away in some Tremé cottage—a colored mistress he somehow made very, very angry?”
“It’s possible.”
“You could always try asking his wife.” A lingering spark of malice glittered in the big New Yorker’s eyes as he leaned in close to whisper, “It’s called pillow talk.”
With effort, Zach just managed to keep a tight rein on his temper. There was no denying Hamish had a damned good reason to be nursing a grievance. “She might not know.”
“Huh,” scoffed Hamish. “That woman? If her husband was keeping a colored bit on the side, she’d have known.” Beside them, a dark-skinned woman in a plaid tignon had set up a table against the Square’s rusting iron fence and was selling bottles of bière du pays from a bucket of cold water. Hamish stopped to buy a couple, then lingered under the stand’s fluttering canopy of gaily colored cotton and pressed one dripping bottle to his face. “So why exactly are we here?” he said, handing the second bottle to Zach. “Seems to me maybe we’d do better checking out the balls at the Salle d’Orleans. See what dusky beauties are looking for new protectors.”
Across the Square, near the swaying, cheering crowd of spectators, a woman turned. A tall, handsome woman with a swanlike neck and graceful carriage and skin the color of café au lait.
“Here, hold this,” said Zach, thrusting his dripping bottle of apple ginger beer into the New Yorker’s free hand.
“Hey!” yelled Hamish, his beer bottle–filled hands spreading wide. “Where you going?”
Zach was already pushing his way through the crowd. “Go have some jambalaya or estomac mulâtre,” he called back. “I’ll find you.”
By the time Zach reached the far side of the Square, Rose had disappeared.
Frustrated and hot, with beads of perspiration rolling down his spine and his shirt sticking to his skin, Zach stood at the edge of the stomping, clapping circle and listened to the jungle beat of the tam-tam and the ghostly rattle of the jawbones. He could feel the rhythm begin to vibrate through him, stirring his soul, awakening the primitive, lingering vestiges of a jungle past that live in all men.
“Got to be some kind of a fool,” said a woman’s melodic voice from behind him, “wearing a heavy blue wool uniform in heat like this.”
Zach swung about to find Rose staring at him with a closed, unsmiling face. It was at least ninety-five degrees in the sun, the air full of dust, even the breeze hot. Yet she looked serene and unruffled and enviably, unbelievably cool. “You knew I was looking for you,” he said.
“I knew.”
He wondered why, having avoided him, she’d decided instead to approach him. He let his gaze drift over the swaying crowd, men and women and children of all ages. Some were coarse and ungainly, common and plain, as at any gathering. But there was a beauty here, too, a breath-catching beauty clad in dusky or golden skin, with exquisitely molded bone structure and a feline grace intensified by the lure of the exotic, that same inescapable sensuality that was there in the beat of the drums and the wild gyrations of the dancers.
“I understand a lot of rich white men down here keep colored mistresses,” Zach said, almost casually.
Rose gave him a long, hard look. “Lots of white men do. But Michie Philippe wasn’t one of them, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Why not? He was hardly faithful to his wife.”
“See that child over there?” Rose nodded toward a little girl of about six who stood wide-eyed and mesmerized at the fringe of the crowd. She was as delicate and beautiful as a Dresden figurine, small of bone and pale of skin, with eyes of the brightest blue and a riot of golden curls that tumbled down the back of her expensive, lace and ribbon trimmed gown. “You look at her, and what do you see?”
“I see a pretty little girl.”
“A pretty little white girl?”
“Of course.”
Rose sniffed. “That’s because you from up North. You haven’t been taught what to look for, like folks from around here. People here, they look at that girl, and they don’t see her white skin, or those pretty blue eyes. They see the particular way her blond hair curls, and how full her lips are, and what a long, thin neck she’s got on her, the way she holds herself when she walks, and they don’t need anyone to tell them, they know. They know that she’s not really white.”
“But she is white,” said Zach, knowing what Rose meant, yet unable to accept it. “Her skin is whiter than mine.”
“Sure it is. Four grandparents that child had, and three of them were white. But one of them was black. That’s all that matters. Even if it was just one great-grandmother, or even a great-great-grandmother, it’d be enough. That child might have blond hair and blue eyes and skin paler than you
rs, but she’d still be colored.”
As Zach watched, the little girl tossed back her head in a quick laugh and began to run. A man knelt down to sweep her up into his arms, a white man with the high black boots and unmistakably patrician air of a successful planter. The woman at his side was as fineboned and beautiful as the child, although the woman’s skin and hair were both perceptibly darker. They were a family, of sorts, this rich white man with his colored lady mistress and their pale-skinned, golden-haired, colored child. But somewhere, whether in the city or out on a plantation, this man would have another family, a white, legitimate family, untainted by African slave blood.
“And you know what the worst part of it is?” Rose was saying. “That little girl thinks she’s colored, too. She might look in the mirror and see white, but inside, she knows she’s colored. All that white blood flowing through her? It might as well not even be there.”
Zach stood very still, staring down at the proud, beautiful woman beside him. White blood flowed in her veins, too. He wondered how she reconciled these two disparate heritages that had joined and become one within her, the slaver, and the enslaved. And then he realized she hadn’t reconciled them. Rose’s father might have been white, but as far as Rose and the rest of the world were concerned, she was colored.
“Not many whites understand that,” she said more quietly, her voice losing some of its vehemence, “understand what it means. But Philippe de Beauvais, he understood. A man goes around poking his thing into colored women, and sooner or later, he’s going to have a child like that little girl over there. A child that don’t belong nowhere. Too black to be white, and too white to be black. Michie Philippe, he wasn’t going to do that to no child of his.”
Zach let out a long, surprisingly painful sigh. “So can you think of a French-speaking colored woman who might have had a reason for wanting to see Philippe de Beauvais dead?”
Rose breathed a harsh laugh. “Maybe it was me, mmm? That what you thinking? That maybe it was me who drove out to the Bayou Crevé and had that little talk with your Yankee patrol?”
“Did you?”
She was no longer laughing. Eyes hard and glassy, she leaned into him, one dusky hand coming up to close around the silver amulet she wore at her neck. “If I was going to start killing, Michie Philippe’s name wouldn’t have been on my list.”
“So who would be?” he asked, holding himself quite still.
“Who?” She laughed, a real laugh this time, before she turned away. “Maybe you.”
He couldn’t find Hamish.
Zach wandered through the crowd, his gaze scanning the lines of booths selling chicory-flavored coffee and sweet cakes and sagamité . He stood for a time watching the boys playing raquettes, then he made another round of the throng near the dancers, all without success. He had just about decided that Hamish must have gone off chasing a pickpocket or some other malefactor who’d offended his New York policeman’s soul, when a dark-skinned little boy with tightly curled hair and a bare, rib-thin chest careened into Zach’s bad leg with enough force to send him staggering.
“Steady, lad,” said Zach, grasping the boy’s skinny shoulders as the two of them almost toppled into a stand selling roasted peanuts. “You all right there?”
The boy looked up at Zach with vivid, scared green eyes. Then he snatched the Colt pistol from Zach’s belt and took off at a run.
“Hey!” Zach shouted as the boy slid around the corner of the next booth. “Come back here with that.”
The boy dove into the crowd, Zach hard on his heels. He was little and thin, sliding easily under a big man’s spread elbows and darting through a group of tignon-headed women who had to step back, mouths gaping, to let Zach through. But Zach had the authority of his blue uniform and his white, privileged skin. The crowd parted before him.
He chased the boy out the Square and across the dusty street, the little boy’s bare feet flying, his skinny brown arms pumping as he worked to suck air into his heaving chest. By now, Zach was beginning to notice that while people might be moving out of his way, they were always just a shade slow and a bit awkward in doing it. Their sympathy was all for the little boy with the woolly hair, and they were doing the best they could to help him get away.
The boy wasn’t exactly getting away, but Zach wasn’t gaining on him, either. Zach was starting to suck in air by now himself, the blue wool of his uniform hot and damp and uncomfortable. He followed the boy down a sun-blasted block of narrow shotgun houses and around a corner into a short lane lined with boarded-up old warehouses and brick outbuildings that rose straight up from the banquette and closed in around him like a trap. The boy skidded to a halt and swung about, his eyes darting everywhere, his entire body shuddering with fear and exhaustion.
“Give me the pistol,” said Zach, his own breath soughing painfully in and out, the sweat running into his eyes. “Give it to me now, and I’ll let you go.”
The little boy backed away, the pistol clutched to his skinny, heaving chest, his eyes so wide, Zach thought it a wonder they didn’t pop right out of his head.
“I won’t hurt you,” Zach said. “Just give me the gun.”
The boy was no longer looking at Zach but at something beyond him. Something, or someone. Zach turned slowly, one hand going by habit to the hilt of his saber.
There were some eight men behind him, maybe ten. Black men, men with skin of ebony or chocolate and stony, enigmatic faces. Zach brought his saber singing from its scabbard, but he already knew it was useless. He could kill six, maybe more of these men. But the one who was going to kill him was the one who stood near the back, calmly lifting a Choctaw blowgun to his lips. If Zach had still had his Colt, he could have shot the man easily. But whoever planned this, whoever had sent that little black boy to steal Zach’s gun and lure him here, had already thought of that.
Only, whoever wanted Zach dead had reckoned without a bottle of bière du pays, and a black-gloved lady who knew exactly which part of a man’s head to aim for.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The bottle didn’t break when Emmanuelle de Beauvais brought it down on the back of the black man’s head. But the impact stunned him enough to knock the blowgun from his hands and send him staggering, and that was all Zach needed. He leaped forward, saber swinging, and heard Emmanuelle cry, “ Elas! Don’t kill them all.”
Zach’s sword caught the man nearest him in the throat. “Why”—he jerked the bloodied blade free, his teeth gritting, eyes narrowing with fury as he swung again—“not?” He kicked the second man off the saber, and lunged at a third. “They’re trying to—” His sword caught the third man in the arm, but he was already running away. They were all running, feet scrabbling, eyes wide as they threw quick, frightened glances over their shoulders. Zach let them go, his bloodred blade dripping as he lowered the point. “—kill me.”
He twisted slowly to gaze back at the woman who still stood near the entrance to the cul-de-sac, the fraying black ribbons of her mourning bonnet fluttering in the hot breeze as she stared at the dead men sprawled around her. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, his voice coming out harsh, cold.
She raised her head to look at him, her face as composed and emotionless as if they’d been mere acquaintances discussing a balloon ascension, or a performance of one of the circuses that used to set up in the Square. Yet the last time he’d seen her, she’d been naked in her bed. She’d been naked, and he’d told her he loved her, and she’d effectively kicked him in the balls with her response. Now she said simply, “I saw you chase that little colored boy down the street, and then I noticed these men. I thought you might need help.”
The wind gusted up, harder, rustling the leaves of a stand of live oaks nearby and setting their dripping swags of moss to swaying back and forth against the sun-leached sky. “Did Papa John tell you someone was planning to kill me?”
She shook her head.
He walked up to her, his saber dripping blood into the sun-dried mud at
her feet. “But you were there, weren’t you? That afternoon.”
Dropping her gaze, she stooped to pick up the furze-tipped dart the black man had dropped. Wary of its sharp end, she held it carefully beneath her nose and sniffed.
“Don’t tell me,” Zach said, driving his saber back into its scabbard with a vicious hiss. “It’s poisoned, right?”
Her breath came in a long, shuddering sigh, as if she’d been holding it. “I’m afraid so.”
Reaching out, he touched his hand to her cheek, turning her face up to him. “You saved my life,” he said, his voice softening as the blood lust thrumming through him began to drain away. “Just saying thank you doesn’t seem very adequate.”
He saw her lips tremble, then stretch into a smile that would have stolen his heart, if he hadn’t lost it to her long ago. “I guess you could buy me a new bottle of ginger beer.”
Zach never did get the chance to buy her that ginger beer.
He had two dead bodies and a growing crowd to deal with. The arrival of Hamish, breathing hard and dripping with sweat and looking dangerously red in the face, helped in some ways, but not in others.
“Everybody clear the area,” he barked in his loud, New York policeman’s voice, his arms sweeping back and forth like someone trying to herd a reluctant gaggle of geese. “Back, back, back.” He leveled a fierce, suspicious stare at Emmanuelle, and said, “It’d be best if you left, too, ma’am.”
“Of course, Captain.” The serenity of her expression never slipped. “Although I suggest you consider having something to drink and sitting down to rest for a few minutes. A man of your size and habits shouldn’t rush about in this heat.” She turned to go, leaving Hamish sputtering and gulping, his mustaches twitching alarmingly.
Zach stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
Looking up, she met his gaze and gave him a shaky half-smile. He had held this woman naked and hungry in his arms. He had joined his body to hers, lost himself with her in a night of dark passion and wild ecstasy and quiet communion. Yet she was still a mystery to him. A part of her was still hidden from him, kept inaccessible to him. “Yes,” she said simply.
Midnight Confessions Page 27
