A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  There was an angry murmur from the ballroom. January saw several of the men—mostly Americans—glance toward the curtained passageway and guessed they’d have a number of desertions the moment Shaw was out of sight. “Mr. Froissart,” said Shaw softly, “could you be so kind as to lend us your office for the interviews? It’ll likely take most of the night, there bein’ so many. Would it trouble you too much to make coffee for the folks here? Boechter,” he added, motioning one of his constables near, “see to it nobody wanders in off’n the street, would you?”

  Or wanders out, thought January, though he guessed Constable Boechter wasn’t going to be much of a deterrent if Peralta or Destrehan grew impatient and decided to quit the premises. Shaw motioned him over and said, “Maestro? I’d purely take it as a favor if while you’re waitin’ you’d play some music, give ’em somethin’ to listen to. Sounds silly, but music doth have charms an’ all that.”

  January nodded. He wondered whether it was chance, or whether this upriver barbarian truly knew the Creole mind well enough to understand that by turning the nuisance into a social occasion with food, coffee, and music, he would keep his witnesses in the room. “If it’s as well for you, Dominique and I can wait to be interviewed last. Sir. You may want to get through as many of these as you can before they get bored and start walking out.”

  The lieutenant smiled for the first time, and it changed his whole slab-sided face. “You may have a point, Maestro. I think I’ll need to talk to your sister first off, to get the shape of what it is I’m askin’.” He spoke softly enough to exclude not only the men grouped in the ballroom doorway, but Froissart and his own constables. “I take it your sister’s here with her man?”

  “He’ll have gone by this time,” said January. “Half the men here tonight just slipped back through to the Théâtre; their wives and mothers are going to swear they were with them all night on that side. I doubt there’s anything you can do about that.”

  Shaw spat again—he had yet to make his target—but other than that kept his opinion to himself. “Well, we can only do what we can. You may be waitin’ a piece.… What is your name?”

  “January. Benjamin January.” He handed him his card.

  Shaw slipped it into the sagging pocket of his green corduroy coat. “Like they say, it’s the custom of the country.”

  From his post on the dais, January could watch the entire long ballroom and hear the surge and babble of talk as now one masked gentleman, now another, exited for questioning. Those who really didn’t want to be questioned slipped off the moment Shaw was out of sight, but the Kaintuck’s instinct had been a wise one: Romulus Valle replenished the collation on the tables with fresh oysters, beignets, and tarts newly baked from the market, and the somber glory of coffee, and this, combined with the light, calming airs of Mozart and Haydn, Schubert, and Rossini, created a partylike atmosphere. No Creole, January knew, was going to leave a party, certainly not if doing so would rob him of the chance to talk about it later. Secure in the knowledge that they were masked, wouldn’t be identified, and that none of this really had anything to do with them, most stayed, and in fact more than a few returned from the Théâtre rather than lose out on the novelty.

  Augustus Mayerling set up a faro bank in a corner and systematically fleeced everyone in sight. A slightly spindle-shanked Apollo got into a furious argument with one of the several Uncases present and had to be separated by three of Mayerling’s students before another duel ensued. Jean Bouille quoted to everyone who would listen the exact content of the letters William Granger had written to the Courier about him, and verbatim accounts of what he had written in return in the Bee.

  The older women like Agnes Pellicot, and the daughters they had brought to show, had the best time: The men took the opportunity of a new experience to flirt with the young girls, and the mothers gossiped to their hearts’ content. January reflected that his own mother would burst a blood vessel to think that she hadn’t deigned to show up tonight and so had missed something her cronies would be discussing for weeks.

  Only now and then could Euphrasie Dreuze’s weeping be heard. Once Hannibal turned his head a little and remarked, “That was a good one.” And when January frowned, puzzled, he explained, “You have to have lungs like an opera singer to make your grief carry through two closed doors and the corridor.”

  “She did lose her daughter,” said January.

  “She lost a son in the cholera last summer and went to a ball the same night she heard the news. Got up in black like an undertaker’s mute, true, leaving streaks of it on every chair in the Pontchartrain Ballroom and telling everyone present how prostrate she was with grief, but she stayed till the last waltz and went out for oysters afterward. I was there.”

  Old Xavier Peralta evidently hadn’t been apprised of this piece of gossip, however, for he gathered up a cup of coffee and slipped quietly from the ballroom; January saw him turn in the direction of the corridor from the lobby. Whatever he felt about the woman during negotiations for her daughter’s contract, grief was grief.

  His was the only sign of bereavement. Men sipped whisky from silver hip flasks or from the tiny bottles concealed in the heads of their canes and flirted with the girls. Probably fearing that he’d be asked to pay for all four if they stayed, Monsieur Froissart released Jacques and Uncle Bichet, but after he was questioned by the guards, Hannibal returned with another bottle of champagne and continued to accompany January’s arias and sonatinas with the air of a man amusing himself. January suspected that the other two had only gone as far as the kitchens anyway, where they would sit trading speculations with Romulus Valle until almost morning.

  As people moved in and out of the ballroom or through the lobby past the doorways, January kept watching the crowd, searching for the golden buckskin gown and the silly crown of black cock feathers. It would have been insanity for her to remain, but he could not put from his mind the fleeting impression he had had of her presence in the ballroom after he’d begun to play; could not forget the hard desperation in her eyes as she’d said, I must see her … I MUST. He wondered what she so urgently needed to discuss with the dead woman, and whether Angelique’s death would make matters better for her, or worse.

  Taking his advice—or perhaps simply following the dictates of logic—Shaw questioned all the men first and turned them out of the building, then the women, who were quite content to remain; though after the departure of the men most of the buffet vanished as well. Monsieur Froissart was under no illusions about which group constituted his more important clientele. A few gentlemen waited for their plaçées in the lobby downstairs or in the gambling rooms. Others, conscious of wives, mothers, and fiancées in the other side of the building, simply left instructions with coachmen—or in some cases employees of the ballroom—to see the ladies home. Few of the plaçées complained or expressed either indignation or annoyance. They were used to looking after themselves.

  It was nearly five in the morning when January was conducted by a guardsman down the rear stairway—out of consideration to those still in the gambling rooms—and into Froissart’s office.

  The place smelled overwhelmingly of burnt tallow and expectorated tobacco. “I’d have started with the mothers, myself,” sighed Lt. Shaw, pinching off the long brownish winding sheet from one of the branch of kitchen candles guttering on the desk. In his shirtsleeves the resemblance to a poorly made scarecrow was increased, his leather galluses cutting across the cheap calico of his shirt like wheel ruts, his long arms hanging knobby and cat scratched out of the rolled-up sleeves. Windrows of yellow paper heaped the desk’s surface, and a smaller pile on the side table next to a graceful Empire chair marked where the clerk had sat. January wondered how accurate the notes on the costumes were.

  He was a little surprised when Shaw motioned him to a chair. Most Americans—in fact most whites—would have let a man of color stand.

  “You’re right about that, sir,” he said. “They’re the ones who would hav
e seen anything worth seeing.”

  Coffee cups stood in a neat cluster in one corner of the desk—presumably brought in by the men when they were questioned. Even at this hour, voices clamored drunkenly in the street, though the general tenor had lowered to a masculine bass. The brass band, wherever it was, was still going strong, on its fifth or sixth iteration of the same ten tunes. On the way from the back stairs to the office January had heard the noise from the gambling rooms, as strong now as it had been at seven-thirty the previous evening.

  “Now, there’s a fact.” Shaw stretched his long arms, uncricking his back in a series of audible pops. “I sure wouldn’t want to go bargainin’ with one of them old bissoms, and I don’t care what her daughter looked like. I seen warmer Christian charity at Maspero’s Slave Exchange than I seen in the eyes of that harpy in yellow.… Leastwise this way the daughter gets the good of it, and not some rich man who’s got a plantation already. You know Miss Crozat?”

  “By reputation,” said January. “I met her once or twice when she was little, but her mama kept her pretty close. She was only seven when I left for Paris in 1817, and she wasn’t a student of mine. I taught piano back then, too,” he explained. “I expect I’d have met her sooner or later, now I’m back. Her mother and mine are friends.”

  “But your sister says you say you talked to her tonight.”

  January nodded. “I’d been charged by a friend to arrange a meeting with her at my mother’s house, tomorrow afternoon … this afternoon. I haven’t had time to talk to my mother about it yet. I’ve lived with my mother since I came back from Paris in November. It’s on Rue Burgundy.”

  Shaw made a note. “Any idea what the meetin’ was about? And could I get the name of your friend?”

  “I have no idea about the meeting. If it’s all the same to you … sir,” he remembered to add, “… I’d rather keep my friend’s name out of this. The message was given in confidence.”

  It was his experience that white men frequently expected blacks or colored to do things as a matter of course that would have been a dueling matter for a white, but Shaw only nodded. The rain-colored eyes, lazy and set very deep, rested thoughtfully on him for a time, shadowed in the rusty glare that fell through the fanlight, as Madame Trepagier’s had been shadowed. “Fair enough for now. I might have to ask you again later, if ’n it looks like it has some bearin’ on who took the girl’s life. Tell me about your talk with her.”

  “It wasn’t much of a talk,” said January slowly, sifting, picking through his recollections, trying to excise everything that would indicate that the one who sent the message was white, Creole, a woman, a widow … connected to Angelique … present in the building …

  With his dirty, dead-leaf hair and lantern-jawed face, Abishag Shaw gave the impression of an upriver hayseed recently escaped from a plow tail, but in those sleepy gray eyes January could glimpse a woodsman’s cold intelligence. This man was an American and held power, for all his ungrammatical filthiness. As Froissart had said, there was a world of matters the Americans did not understand, and chief among them the worlds of difference that separated colored society from the African blacks.

  “She refused to meet with my friend. She said she’d received notes before from … my friend, that she had nothing to say to … them.” He changed the last word quickly from her, but had the strong suspicion that Shaw guessed anyway. “She said her father was an important man, and that my friend had best not try any … little tricks.”

  “What kind o’ little tricks?” asked Shaw mildly. “You mean like brick dust on the back step? Or accusin’ her of being uppity an’ gettin’ her thrashed at the jailhouse?”

  “One or the other,” said January, wondering if he’d let the answer go at that.

  Shaw nodded again. “She say anythin’ to you? About you?”

  Genuinely startled, January said, “No. Not that I remember.”

  “Insult you? Make you mad? Phlosine …” He checked a note. “Gal named Phlosine Seurat says she heard the door slam.”

  “It was Galen Peralta who slammed the door,” said January. “He came in—”

  “Galen Peralta? Xavier Peralta’s boy? One she had the tiff with earlier?” Shaw sat up and took his boots off the desk, and spat in the general direction of the office sandbox.

  January regarded him with reciprocal surprise. “Didn’t anyone else tell you?”

  The policeman shook his head. “When was this? Last anybody saw of the boy was when he tore that fairy wing o’ hers in the lobby, an’ she went flouncin’ off into that little parlor in a snit. Last anybody saw o’ her, for that matter. This Seurat gal—an’ the two or three others who was up in the upstairs lobby—say the boy stormed off down the stairs, and somebody says they seen him in the court, but they don’t remember if that was before or after or when.”

  “There’s a way in from the court to the passage outside this office,” said January. “He could have changed his mind, had what they call l’esprit d’escalier …”

  “Bad case of the I-shoulda-said,” agreed Shaw mildly, sitting back again. Outside, men’s voices rose in furious altercation; there was the monumental thud of a body hitting the wall that made the building shake. “I dunno how many sweethearts come to grief from one or the other of ’em comin’ up with just the right coup de grâce halfway down the front walk. Go on.”

  “If he came up the back stairs nobody in the lobby downstairs, or upstairs, would have seen him. Because he did come in, as I think she knew he would. She thought I was him, when I first came into the room, before she turned around, and she had her lines all ready for him. The boy had a temper. And there isn’t a seventeen-year-old in the world with the sense to just walk away.”

  “God knows I didn’t,” said Shaw, getting up and stretching his back. “Near got me killed half a dozen times, when I came up with just the right thing to say to my pa when he was likkered. And you left then?”

  January nodded. “Yes, sir. There was no reason for me to stay, and the boy would have ordered me out in any case. My sister and Marie-Anne Pellicot were hunting for Mademoiselle Crozat for the rest of the night. Galen’s father, too. I thought at the time the two of them went off somewhere to have their fight in more privacy, but it may be that he left fairly soon—during the jig and reel we started up to distract everyone from Bouille and Granger—and that she was still in the room fixing her wing when the murderer came on her.”

  The colorless eyebrows quirked. “Now, where you get that from?”

  “Here.” January got to his feet, Shaw following in his wake. They climbed the dark of the back stairs, turned right at the top, to where a sleepy constable still guarded the parlor door. A cup and a half-eaten pastry lay on the floor beside his chair. He got to his feet and saluted.

  “We got everything up off that rug, Mr. Shaw. The mother took the girl away, like you said she could.”

  “And no sign of them geegaws that’s missin’?”

  “No, sir.” The man unlocked the door.

  The candles were guttering in here, too. The windows had been shut, and the room had a crumpled look and smelled of smoke and death. The brass band outside had silenced itself, and the voices of the few passersby rang loud.

  January crossed at once to the stiffened gauze wings, still leaning where Dominique had propped them, against the armoire that had concealed Angelique’s body. He reached down, very carefully, and touched the needle, hanging by the end of the thread. “Mostly if a woman stops sewing she’ll stick the needle into the fabric to keep the thread from pulling free,” he said. “Few things drive a woman crazier than having to rethread a needle when she hasn’t planned on it. I don’t know why this is.”

  Shaw’s ugly face cracked into a smile again. “Now, there’s a man been married.” He looked around for someplace to spit, found no spittoon, and opened the window and shutter a crack to spit out across the balcony. January hoped Cardinal Richelieu was on the street beneath.

  While Shaw
was so engaged, January glanced down at the table, where the candles had been pushed aside around the top of a cardboard dress box. January lifted the box gently and angled it to the light, studying the dozen different colors of ribbon laid out in it, the innumerable tag ends of thread; two needles and fourteen pins; the peacock eye and the pearls and a large number of shreds of dyed and undyed ostrich plume. A ball of swansdown shreds the size of a sheep’s stomach. Lace snagged from someone’s petticoat.

  Half a dozen hooks and eyes. Somebody’s corset lace. The servants of both ballroom and theater would be picking up pounds of this kind of trash all morning.

  From the midst of it he picked a leaf of swamp laurel. “The Roman in the golden armor,” he said. “Jenkins, I think Granger said his name was. He was wreathed for victory.”

  “You got quite an eye for furbelows.” Shaw strolled back, hands in pockets, as if only such bracing kept his gawky body upright. “That was smart, ’bout the costumes.”

  “My wife was a dressmaker.” January turned the bits of thread, pearl, ribbon in his kid-gloved fingers. There were two ways a man could have said what Shaw did, even as there were two ways he could have earlier remarked on Minou, Beautiful gal. “There never was a time when I wasn’t surrounded by ribbons and lace and watching her match them up into some of the prettiest gowns you ever saw.”

  He smiled, remembering. “There was a lady—some baron’s wife—who drove her crazy, asking for more of this and more of that and not offering to pay a sou for it. Ayasha put up with this till this old cat started coming on to her about how a Christian woman would have thrown it in as lagniappe. Then she just changed the color of the ribbons on the corsage—and mind you, that color was all the crack that year, and this old harpy was delighted with the change—and I’ve never seen one woman get so ugly so fast.”

  He shook his head, and saw Shaw’s gray eyes on him again, as if hearing the pain that lurked under the joy of any memory of her.

  “Your wife was an Arab?”