A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  Lace crushed and broken at the back of her collar, knotted with the gaudy tangle of real and artificial chevelure. In the dim light of the candles it was hard to tell, but he didn’t think there were threads caught in it, though there might be some in her dark hair. Fluffs of swansdown from her torn sleeve were scattered across the gorgeous Turkey carpet, thickest just to the left of the low chair. A cluster of work candles stood on the small table immediately to the chair’s right, draped with huge, uneven winding-sheets of drippings. They’d been there when he’d come in. She’d been fixing her wings, he remembered, by their light. In France it would have been an oil lamp, but mostly in New Orleans they used candles. The drippings were distorted from repeated draughts—people had been in and out of the parlor all evening, fixing their ruffles or looking for her. Froissart was lucky the table hadn’t been kicked over in the struggle. The whole building could have gone up.

  Swansdown wasn’t the only thing on the carpet. A peacock eye near the chair told him that Sultana girl in the blue lustring had been here. A dozen calibers of imitation pearls were trodden into the carpet: Marie-Anne had had large ones on her mask and bodice, and the drop-shaped ones he’d seen on the sleeves of the American Henry VIII’s Anne Boleyn. Mardi Gras costumes were never made as well as street clothes, and ribbons, glass gems, and silk roses dotted the floor among thread ends of every color of the rainbow. In the padded arm of the velvet chair a needle caught the light like a splinter of glass.

  Drunken laughter floated in from the Rue Ste.-Ann through the single tall window that nearly filled one side of the room. The brass band still played in the street. Shouts of mirth, a woman’s shrill squeak of not entirely displeased protest. Men cursed in French, German, slangy riverboat English, and there was a heavy splash as someone fell into the gutter, followed by whoops of drunken laughter.

  January glanced at the window, not daring to break Froissart’s self-centered oblivion by walking over to check whether there were marks on the sill. The killer could have stepped out one of the ballroom windows and walked along the gallery, he supposed. But with the heat of the ballroom, other revelers had taken refuge on the gallery, and such an escape would not have gone unseen.

  Carnival rioted below, thick in these narrow streets of the old French town, drowning the sounds of the ballroom itself. In the growing upriver suburbs, in their tall brick American houses on the new streets along the tracks of the horse-drawn streetcars, Protestants would be shaking their heads about the goings-on. Though perhaps, reflected January, a number of those Protestant wives wondered—or tried not to wonder—where their husbands were tonight.

  Last summer everyone in the ballroom—everyone in the streets—everyone in the city—had been through the horrors of a double epidemic: yellow fever and Asiatic cholera, worse than any that had gone before. They had survived it, mostly by clearing out of town if they could afford to, taking refuge in the lakeside hotels of Mandeville and Milneburgh or on plantations. Typical of the Creoles, they celebrated the victory rather than mourned the loss. But there was no guarantee that in five months it wouldn’t return.

  He remembered Ayasha and crossed himself again. There was no guarantee about anything.

  “They simply do not understand.” Froissart’s voice brought him back to the present. The man was now well worked into his theme. January kept an expression of fascinated interest in his face, but barely heard him. It was only a few hundred feet to the Cabildo, and ordinarily a woman—even a beautiful one—was quite safe walking about the streets alone, provided she kept out of certain well-defined districts: the waterfront or the bars along Rue du Levée; the Swamp or the Irish Channel.

  But Carnival was different.

  “Americans have no finesse, no sense of how things are done!” Froissart’s gesture to heaven was worthy of Macbeth perishing in the final act.

  “They sure don’t, sir.” If he’s buying, I’ll sell it to him.

  “The Americans, they don’t know how to behave! They don’t know how to take mistresses. They think it’s all a matter of money. For them, money is everything! Look at the houses they build, out along the Carrolton Road, in the LaFayette suburb and Saint Mary! I recall a time—not ten years ago it was!—that the whole of the city of Jefferson was the Avart and Delaplace plantations, and a half-dozen others, the best sugar land on the river. And what do they do now? They build a streetcar line, they tear up the fields, and the next thing you know, you have these dreadful American houses with their picket fences! Exactly that which that canaille Granger proposes to do along Bayou Saint John! Him, fight a duel? Pffui!”

  He flung out his hands in indignation—evidently challenges to duels, like trouncings with canes or fistfights in the court downstairs, did not come under the same category as murder.

  “Why, in my office this evening, the way he and those sordid friends of his behaved! A disgrace! They are not gentlemen! They have no concept! They cannot tell Rossini from ‘Turkey in the Straw’!”

  “You’re right about that, sir,” agreed January gravely. As he spoke he felt a deep annoyance at himself, to be playing along as he had played along during his childhood and adolescence, falling back into the old double role of manipulating a white man’s illusions about what a man of color was and thought. Still, the role was there, script and inflections and bits of business, a weapon or tool with whose use he was familiar, though he felt dirtied by its touch. “In Paris, the Americans were the same way. Every ball I’d play at, you could tell right where the Americans were sitting.”

  “And that is why we cannot summon the police tonight,” concluded Froissart, turning regretfully back to the beautiful, ruined woman lying between them. “They do not understand how to do these things quietly, discreetly. Of course, of course they must be summoned in the morning—after I have spoken to Monsieur Davis.… Of course he will want to summon them.…” He chewed his lip in an agony of uncertainty, and January remembered the mother of one of his friends in Paris, who would put aside bills “for a few days until I know I have the money” and then eventually burn them unread.

  Angelique’s body was a bill that would be burned unread. Not because she was an evil woman or because she had harmed every life she touched, but only because she was colored and a plaçée.

  “Well, what would you?” sighed Froissart—January could almost see Mme. du Gagny sliding yet another dressmaker’s dun into that nacre-and-rosewood secrétaire. “It is how it is.… Good heavens, how long have we been here? People will begin to ask.… You must return to your piano and say nothing, nothing. Be assured that the matter will be taken care of in the morning.”

  January inclined his head and arose. “I’m sorry,” he said humbly. “I was so shaken up by seeing her here like this, I … It took me a while to get my thoughts back. Thank you for your patience with me.”

  Froissart beamed patronizingly. “One understands,” he said, as if he himself hadn’t gone fishbelly green at the sight of the body—January guessed he was one of those who headed for Mandeville at the first of the summer heat and had never been through an epidemic at firsthand in his life. “Of course, the shock of it all. I hope you are better.”

  “Much,” said January, wondering if he should fake a spell of dizziness with the shock and rejecting the idea—and his own consideration of it—with loathing. He made a show of looking around as if he’d forgotten something, playing for as much time as he could scrape. “Much better.”

  Froissart turned and left the jewelbox room with its grisly occupant, and January perforce followed. He glanced back at the crumpled body, the grasping and greedy woman who had assumed he was a slave because his skin was darker than hers. Still, she did not deserve to be forgotten like an unpaid bill. I did my best, he apologized. More, certainly, than he would ever have accorded her in life.

  As he left he laid the four coins Froissart had given him gently on the table by the door.

  “Romulus!” called Froissart. “Romulus, I …”

&n
bsp; They emerged from the hallway into the lobby in time to see a small party of blue-clothed city guardsmen arrive at the top of the stairs.

  Froissart stopped, goggling, as if he hoped these were another group of revelers, like Robin Hood’s Merry Men or the Ladies of the Harîm.

  But none of them were masked. And no Creole he knew, thought January, would have the wit to dress that much like an out-at-elbows upriver Kaintuck, with a shabby, flapping corduroy coat many years out of fashion and too short in the sleeves for his loose-jointed height.

  Minou slipped past them, startlingly invisible for someone so beautiful and brightly clad, and melted into the crowd in the ballroom like snow on the desert’s dusty face. The tall officer stepped forward and laid a black-nailed hand on Froissart’s arm.

  “Mr. Froissart?” Interestingly, he got the pronunciation right. “ ’Fore you and your boy head on back to the ballroom, we’d like to talk to you.” His tone was polite but his backcountry dialect so thick that his English was barely comprehensible.

  Two of the guards were heading into the ballroom. The music ceased. Silence, then a rising clamor. January could already hear that the tenor of the noise from the gaming rooms and the downstairs lobby had changed as well.

  “What …” stammered Froissart. “What?…”

  The tall man touched the brim of his low-crowned hat, and spit a stream of tobacco in the general direction of the sandbox. He was unshaven, noisome, and the sugar-brown hair hanging to his shoulders was stringy with grease. “Abishag Shaw, lieutenant of the New Orleans police, at your service, sir.”

  FIVE

  “This is an outrage!” The plump Ivanhoe who’d been negotiating with Agnes Pellicot stationed himself foursquare in the central of the three ballroom doorways, ornamental sword drawn as if to reenact Roncevaux upon the threshold. Looking past him, January was interested to note that the invisible barriers that had separated the Americans—the Roman, Henry VIII, Richelieu—from the Creoles seemed momentarily to have dissolved. “None of us had the least thing to do with that cocotte’s death, and I consider it an insult for you to say that we have!”

  “Why, hell, sir, I know you got nuthin’ to do with it.” Police Lieutenant Abishag Shaw, though he replied in English, did not appear to have any trouble understanding the man’s French. He folded his long arms, stepped closer to the doorway and lowered his voice as if to exclude the three constables grouped uncertainly behind him, their eyes on the curtained passage to the Théâtre next door. “But I also know men like yourselves don’t miss much of what goes on around them, neither. Anything happen out of the ordinary—an’ maybe you wouldn’ta knowed it was out of the ordinary at the time—you’d a seen it. That’s what I’m countin’ on to help me find this killer.”

  The Creoles muttered and whispered among themselves in French. January heard a man start to say in English, “She’s only a …” The concluding words, nigger whore, remained unsaid, probably more because the speaker realized that saying them would damage his chances with the dead woman’s fellow demimondaines than out of any consideration of good taste. Old Xavier Peralta turned his head. “She was a free woman of this city, sir,” he said quietly. “She is entitled to this city’s justice.”

  “I agree,” said Ivanhoe. “But there is no need for us to unmask to tell you what we have seen tonight.”

  Shaw scratched his unshaven jaw. “Well,” he said in his mild tenor voice, “in fact there is.” And he aimed another long stream of tobacco juice into the nearest spittoon, missing by only inches—not bad at the distance, January thought.

  “Malarkey!” barked Henry VIII. Only men were visible in the doorway, but January could see the silken bevies of women grouped in the other two entries, watching with eyes that held not love, but worried calculation, like the occupants of a sinking vessel computing the square footage of the rafts.

  From the parlor a wailing shriek sliced the air: “Angelique, my baby! My angel! Oh dear God, my baby!” Other voices murmured, soothing, weeping, calming.

  January’s eyes returned to the faces of the men. It was absurd to suppose the murderer was still in the ballroom, or anywhere in the Salle d’Orléans. Henri Viellard certainly wasn’t, having beaten a hasty retreat through the passageway to the concealing skirts of his mother, sisters, and aunts, who would be willing like any group of Creoles to perjure themselves for the good of the family. William Granger likewise seemed, as the Kaintucks put it, to have absquatulated. In fact only a small group of men remained in a room that had been crammed with a preponderance of them moments before. The ladies in the Théâtre d’Orléans must have wondered why their menfolk had developed so sudden a craving for their company.

  January hoped this man Shaw had the wits to set a guard in the Théâtre’s lobby as well as in the court and at the doors from the gaming rooms to the Rue Orléans outside.

  Augustus Mayerling was one of those who remained, arms folded, at the rear of the group. His students, perforce, stood their ground as well, unwilling to have it said of them that they fled while their master remained, although a number of them didn’t look happy about it.

  “This is ridiculous,” declared Ivanhoe. “You overstep your authority, young man.”

  “Well, maybe I do,” agreed Shaw and absentmindedly scratched his chest under his coat. “But if’n you was to be murdered, Mr. Destrehan, I’m sure you’d like to know that the police was keepin’ all suspects and witnesses in the same buildin’ until they could be asked about it.”

  “Not if it meant all but accusing my friends of the deed!” The Knight of the Oak scowled darkly under his helmet’s slatted visor at this offhandedly correct deduction of his identity. “Not if it meant needlessly impugning their reputations, running the risk of exposing their names to the newspapers—”

  “Now, who said a thing about newspapers?”

  “Don’t be a fool, man,” snapped Bouille, who from his well-publicized quarrel with Granger over the past few months had reason to know all about newspapers. He seemed to have either drunk himself to the point where he didn’t care about the risk to his reputation, or more probably simply had no concept that his reputation could be at risk. “Of course the newspapers will get any list you make. And publish it.”

  “Froissart,” ordered a truly awful Leatherstocking, “send one of your people to the police station and get Captain Tremouille and let us end this comedy.”

  “ ’Fraid the captain’s off this evenin’,” said Shaw.

  “He’ll be at the LaFrennière ball,” said Peralta quietly. He turned back to Shaw, the gaslight glittering on the lace at his throat and wrists. “I understand your position, Lieutenant, but surely you must understand ours. There are men here who cannot afford to have their names dragged through the American newspapers, which, you must admit, display very little discretion in their choice of either subject matter or terms of expression. If you cannot take our information without demanding our names, I fear we must stand on our rights as the leading citizens of this town and refuse you our assistance.”

  Under a narrow brow and a hanging forelock of grimy hair, Shaw’s pale eyes glinted. He spat again and said nothing.

  Quietly, January said, “Lieutenant?” He wasn’t sure how the man would take a suggestion from a colored, but every second the impasse lasted increased the chance of someone finding a good reason to forget the whole matter. The man at least seemed to be willing to investigate a plaçée’s death, which was something.

  Shaw considered him for a moment, lashless gray eyes enigmatic under a brow like an outlaw horse’s, then walked to where he stood.

  Very softly January said, “The women will know who’s who. Have a man in the room take down color and kind of costume when these men give their testimonies masked and match up the descriptions with the women later.”

  Shaw studied him for a moment, then said, “You’re the fella found the body.”

  January nodded, then remembered to lower his eyes and say, “Yes, sir.”


  “Froissart tells me you kept him talkin’ and kept the place from bein’ blockaded.”

  January felt his face heat with anger at the master of ceremonies’ casual shifting of criminal blame. He forced calm into his voice. “That wasn’t the way it happened, but I can’t prove that. He was going to have the body taken up to an attic, clean up the room, and not call the police until morning. Maybe not call the police at all.” He wondered for a moment whether this man would have preferred it that way … but in that case he’d have found some reason not to come quickly. “I kept him talking to give my sister time to bring you here.”

  “Ah.” The policeman nodded. His face, ugly as an Ohio River gargoyle, was as inexpressive as a plank. “ ’Xplains why a private citizen all dressed up like Maid Marian brung the news, ’stead of an employee of the house.” His English would have earned January the beating of his life from his schoolmasters or his mother, but he guessed the man’s French was worse. “Now I think on it, ’xplains why anyone brought the news at all. So Miss Janvier’s your sister?”

  “Half-sister. Sir.”

  “Beautiful gal.” The words might have been spoken of a Ming vase or a Brittany sunset, an admiring compliment without a touch of the lascivious. He turned back to the assembled planters, bankers, and merchants crowded in the ballroom door. “Gentlemen,” he said, “as a representative of equal justice in this city, I can’t say I approve of divagatin’ from the law, but I understand yore reasons, and I’m bound to say I accepts ’em.” He shoved back the too-long forelock with fingers like cotton-loom spindles. “With your permission, then, I’ll note down what any of you saw anonymously, and I thank you for doin’ your duty as citizens in figurin’ out the circumstances of this poor girl’s death and findin’ the man what killed her. I will ask that you be patient, since this’ll take some little time.”