A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “Moroccan—Berber,” said January. “But a Christian, though I don’t know how much of any of it she believed. She died last summer.”

  “The cholera?”

  He nodded and picked up a pink velvet rose that had to have come from Dominique’s mask, tiny in his huge hands. “She would have been able to tell you every person who’d been in this room from these bits. My sister can probably tell you most of them.”

  “Don’t mean whoever done it leaked beads and ribbons here to be obligin’,” remarked Shaw. “If that Peralta boy was in plain evenin’ dress, less’n she tore off a button there’d be nuthin’ to show. Now that Jenkins …”

  “He was looking for her,” said January. “Prowling in and out of the ballroom and the lobby. He could have come in here.”

  “You hear this tiff of theirs? In the lobby?”

  “Everybody did. She flirted with Jenkins. From what I hear, she flirted with everybody, or at least everybody who had money.”

  “Even though Peralta’s daddy’s been … What? Buyin’ her for his son?”

  “Not buying her,” said January, though he could tell from Shaw’s voice that the policeman knew the plaçées were technically free. “Bargaining to buy her contract. That way the boy doesn’t get skinned out of his eyeteeth, and the girl doesn’t have to look like a harpy in front of her protector—and her mother can come right out and say, ‘I want to make sure you don’t marry some Creole girl and leave my child penniless with your baby,’ where the girl can’t. It’s all arranged beforehand. Signed and sealed, no questions.”

  Shaw considered the matter, turning the leaf of swamp laurel in his hand. “Smart dealin’,” he said. “What kid’s gonna pick himself even a half decent girl on his first try? When I think about the first girl I ever fell in love with—Lordy!” He shook his head. “You think Miss Crozat was flirtin’ with the Noblest Roman of ’em All to run up her price?”

  “If she was, it was working. The boy was wild when he came into the room. But whether an American would have arrived at the same arrangement as a Frenchman is anybody’s guess.”

  Shaw regarded him for a moment from narrowed eyes, as if weighing this criticism of the habit American planters had of simply buying a good-looking slave woman and taking her whether she would or no. But he only stepped to the window and spat again.

  January followed him to the lobby, where Hannibal Sefton slept curled on a sofa under the flicker of the gaslights while two servants picked up stray champagne cups and swept beads and silk flowers, cigar butts and ribbons, from the brightly colored rugs. The ballroom gaped dim and silent to their right. When they descended the main stair, Shaw sliding snakelike into his weary old green coat, even the gambling rooms behind their shut doors were growing quiet.

  A constable met them in the downstairs lobby, where a broad hall led to the silent dark of the court. The air smelled of rain and mud. Dawn light was bleeding through the half-open doors.

  “We’ve searched the building and the attics, sir,” said the man, saluting. “Nothing.”

  “Thank you kindly, Calvert.” He pronounced it as the French did. Someone—probably Romulus Valle—had placed January’s hat and music satchel on a console in the lobby. January and Shaw walked out into the courtyard together, Shaw turning back to crane his neck and look up at the Salle d’Orléans, rising above them in a wall of pale yellow and olive green.

  There was always something indescribably shabby about this time of the morning in Carnival season, with streets nearly empty under weeping skies and littered with vivid trash. Crossing the courtyard, Shaw looked around him at the gallery, the plane trees, the colored lanterns doused and dark, then walked down the carriageway that let onto Rue Ste.-Ann, watching the occasional fiacre pass filled with homebound revelers and hearing the deep-voiced hoots of the steamboats on the river.

  A woman strolled by, singing “Oystahs! Git yo’ fresh oystahs!” in English, and on the opposite banquette two gentlemen in evening dress, still masked, reeled unsteadily from post to post of the overhanging gallery. A woman improbably clad as a Greek goddess accosted them, her masked face beaming with smiles.

  “Now I wonder what she does for a livin’?” Shaw mused, and spat copiously in the gutter.

  “Not the same as these ladies here tonight,” January said quietly, hearing again the man in the ballroom and Froissart’s dismissive, she is only a plaçée, after all.… He stooped to pick up the single curl of black cock feather that lay wet and forgotten against the alley wall.

  Shaw looked back at him, surprised. “Now I may be a upriver flatboat boy with no classical education, but I know the difference between a courtesan an’ a streetwalker, mask or no mask.”

  “Does it make a difference?” asked January. “Sir?”

  “To me?” asked Shaw. “Or to Mr. Tremouille, when I go back to the Cabildo an’ tell him what we got here?”

  January started to say, You tell me, and shut his mouth on the words. The man was police, the man was white, the man was American. He might have said it to a Creole under the same circumstances, but the uneasiness returned to him, consciousness of the man’s power to harm.

  Shaw rubbed his face again, grubby with brown stubble like a layer of dirt.

  “A woman was kilt,” he said. “She bein’ a free woman, an’ a householder in this city, that meant the tax she paid was payin’ my salary, so it sorta obligates me to avenge her death, don’t it? I be violatin’ any code of conduct if I was to call on your sister this afternoon?” He patted the sheaf of yellow notepapers that stuck out of the pocket of his sagging coat, and donned his disreputable hat.

  “Send her a note this morning giving her the time,” advised January. “That way she can get one of her girlfriends, or probably our mother, to play duenna. Four o’clock’s a good time. She’ll be awake and made up by then, and whatever’s going on at the Crozats’ won’t be until eight or so. You have her address?”

  Shaw nodded. “Thank you kindly,” he said. “I was a constable here last Carnival time—and Lordy, I thought I’d stepped into one of my granny’s picture books!—and it stands to reason there’s gonna be more pockets picked now than any other time. And if a stranger kills a stranger, you don’t hardly never catch him, less’n he does something truly foolish with his loot. But somethin’ tells me it’s a rare thief who’d kill for jewels at a ball in a place like this. And there was plenty of women comin’ an’ goin’ through this tunnel, gussied up just as costive or more so. If somebody killed Miss Crozat for them necklaces she was wearin’, it was a damn fool way to go about it.”

  He stepped out onto the brick banquette, spat into the gutter, and walked away into the weeping dawn, his coat flapping around his slouching form. January watched him out of sight, stroking the black cock feather with his fingertips.

  SIX

  The ochre stucco cottage on Rue Burgundy was silent when January reached it. It was one of a row of four. He listened for a moment at the closed shutters of each of its two front rooms, then edged his way down the muddy slot between the closely set walls of the houses to the yard, where he had to turn sideways and duck to enter the gate. The shutters there were closed as well. The yard boasted a privy, a brick kitchen, and a garçonnière above it.

  When first he had lived there, his sister had occupied the rear bedroom, his mother the front, the two parlors—one behind the other—being used for the entertainment of St.-Denis Janvier. Although he was only nine years old, Benjamin had slept from the first in the garçonnière, waiting until the house lights were put out and then climbing down the rickety twist of the outside stair to run with Olympe and Will Pavegeau and Nic Gignac on their midnight adventures. He smiled, recalling the white glint of Olympe’s eyes as she dared them to follow her to the cemetery, or to the slave dances out on Bayou St. John.

  His younger sister—his full sister—had been a skinny girl then, like a black spider in a raggedy blue-and-red skirt and a calico blouse a slave woman would have scorne
d to wear. Having a back room with access to the yard had made it easy for her to slip out, though he suspected that if she’d been locked in a dungeon, Olympe would still have managed to get free.

  Olympe had been fifteen the year of Dominique’s birth. The two girls had shared that rear chamber for only a year. Then Dominique had occupied it alone, a luxury for a little girl growing up. But then, Dominique had always been her mother’s princess, her father’s pride.

  Presumably Dominique had occupied the room until Henri Viellard had come into her life when she was sixteen. By that time St.-Denis Janvier was dead, leaving his mistress comfortably off, and Livia Janvier had married a cabinetmaker, Christophe Levesque, who had died a few years ago. The rear room that had been Olympe’s, then Dominique’s, had been for a short spell Levesque’s workshop. Now it was shut up, though Minou was of the opinion that her mother should take a lover.

  January stepped to the long opening and drew back one leaf of the green shutters, listening at the slats of the jalousie for his mother’s soft, even breath.

  He heard nothing. Quietly, he lifted the latch, pushed the jalousie inward. The room was empty, ghostly with dust. He crossed to the door of his mother’s bedroom, which stood half-slid back into its socket. Slatted light leaked through the louvers of the doors to the street. The gaily patterned coverlet was thrown back in a snowstorm of clean white sheets. Two butter-colored cats—Les Mesdames—dozed, paws tucked, on the end of the bed, opening their golden eyes only long enough to give him the sort of gaze high-bred Creole ladies generally reserved for drunken keelboat men sleeping in their own vomit in the gutters of the Rue Bourbon. There was water in the washbowl and a robe of heavy green chintz lay draped over the cane-bottomed chair. The smell of coffee hung in the air, a few hours old.

  Euphrasie Dreuze, or one of her friends, he thought. They had come to her for comfort, and Livia Janvier Levesque had gone.

  January crossed the yard again, his black leather music satchel under one arm. There was still fire in the kitchen stove, banked but emitting warmth. The big enamel coffeepot at the back contained several cups’ worth. He poured himself some and carried it up the twisting steps and drank it as he changed his clothes and ate the beignets and pastry he’d cadged from the ballroom tables in the course of the night. Half his gleanings he’d left at Hannibal’s narrow attic, stowed under a tin pot to keep the rats out of it, though he suspected the minute he was gone one or another of the girls who worked cribs in the building would steal it, as they stole Hannibal’s medicine, his laudanum, and every cent he ever had in his pockets.

  Before eating he knelt on the floor beside his bed and took from his pocket the rosary he’d had from his childhood—cheap blue glass beads, a crucifix of cut steel—and told over the swift decades of prayers for the soul of Angelique Crozat. She had been, by his own experience and that of everyone he’d talked to, a thoroughly detestable woman, but only God could know and judge. Wherever she was, she had died unconfessed and would need the prayers. They were little enough to give.

  It was nearly nine in the morning when he dismounted his rented horse at the plantation called Les Saules where, up until two months ago, Arnaud Trepagier had lived.

  A coal-dark butler clothed in the black of mourning came down the rear steps to greet him. “Madame Madeleine in the office with the broker,” the man said, gesturing with one black-gloved hand while a barefoot child took the horse’s bridle and led it to an iron hitching post under the willows scattered all around the house.

  The house itself was old and, like all Creole plantation houses, built high with storerooms on the ground floor. The gallery that girdled it on three sides made it look larger than it was. “She say wait on the gallery, if it please you, sir, and she be out presently. Can I fetch you some lemonade while you’re waiting?”

  “Thank you.” January was ironically amused to see that the servant’s shirt cuffs were less frayed and his clothing newer than the free guest’s. The long-tailed black coat and cream-colored pantaloons he’d worn last night had to be in good condition, for the appearance of a musician dictated in large part where he was asked to play. But though he’d made far more money as a musician than he’d ever made as a surgeon at the Hôtel Dieu—or probably would ever make practicing medicine in New Orleans—there’d never been a great deal to spare, taxes in France being what they were. Now, until he made enough of a reputation to get pupils again, he would have to resign himself to being more down-at-heels than some people’s slaves.

  The butler conducted him up the steps to the back gallery and saw him seated in a cane chair before redescending to cross the crushed-shell path through the garden in the direction of the kitchen. From his vantage point some ten feet above ground level, January could see through the green-misted branches of the intervening willows the mottled greens and rusts of home-dyed muslins as the kitchen slaves moved around the long brick building, starting the preparations for dinner or tending to the laundry room. It seemed that only those who went by the euphemism “servants”—in effect, the house slaves—warranted full mourning for a master they might have loved or feared or simply accepted, as they would have accepted a day’s toil in summer heat. The rest simply wore what they had, home-dyed brown or weathered blue and red cotton calicoes, and the murmur of their voices drifted very faintly to him as they went about their duties.

  Les Saules was a medium-size plantation of about four hundred arpents, not quite close enough to town to walk but an easy half-hour’s ride. The house was built of soft local brick, stuccoed and painted white: three big rooms in a line with two smaller “cabinets” on the back, closing in two sides of what would be the sleeping porch in summer. Panes were missing from the tall doors that let onto the gallery, the openings patched with cardboard, and through the bare trees January could see that the stucco of the kitchen buildings was broken in places, showing the soft brick underneath. In the other direction, past the dilapidated garçonnière and the dovecotes, the work gang weeding the nearby field of second-crop cane looked too few for the job.

  He recalled the heavy strands of antique pearls and emeralds on Angelique Crozat’s bosom and in her hair. Old René Dubonnet, he remembered, had owned fifteen arpents along Lake Pontchartrain, living each year off the advances on next year’s crop. Like most planters and a lot of biblical kings, he had been wealthy in land and slaves but possessed little in the way of cash and was mortgaged to his back teeth. There was no reason to think Arnaud Trepagier was any different.

  But there was always money, in those old families, to keep a town house and a quadroon mistress, just as there was always money to send the sons to Paris to be educated and the daughters to piano lessons and convent schools. There was always money for good wines, expensive weddings, the best horseflesh. There was always money to maintain the old ways, the old traditions, in the face of squalid Yankee upstarts.

  Many years ago, before he’d departed for Paris, January had played at a coming-out party at a big town house on Rue Royale. It had not been too many months after the final defeat of the British at Chalmette, and one of the guests, the junior partner in a brokerage house, had brought a friend, an American, very wealthy, polite, and clearly well-bred, and, as far as January could judge such things, handsome.

  Only one French girl had even gone near him, the daughter of an impoverished planter who’d been trying for years to marry her off. Her brothers had threatened to horsewhip the man if he spoke to her again.

  “Monsieur Janvier?”

  He turned, startled from his reverie.

  Madeleine Trepagier stood in the half-open doors of the central parlor, a dark shape in her mourning dress. Her dark hair was smoothed into a neat coil on the back of her head, eschewing the bunches of curls fashionable in society, and covered with a black lace cap. Without the buckskin mask of a Mohican maid and the silly streaks of red and blue paint, January could see that the promise of her childhood beauty had been fulfilled.

  He rose and bowed. �
�Madame Trepagier.”

  She took a seat in the other cane chair, looking out over the turned earth and winter peas of the kitchen garden. Her mourning gown, fitting a figure as opulent as a Roman Venus’s, had originally been some kind of figured calico, and the figures showed through the home-dyed blackness like the ghostly tabby of a black cat’s fur, lending curious richness to the prosaic cloth. Her fingers were ink-stained, and there were lines of strain printed around her mouth and eyes.

  And yet what struck January about her was her serenity. In spite of her harried weariness, in spite of that secret echo of grimness to her lips, she had the deep calm that arose from some unshakable knowledge rooted in her soul. No matter how many things went wrong, the one essential thing was taken care of.

  But she looked pale, and he wondered at what time she had returned to Les Saules last night.

  “Thank you for your concern last night,” she said in her low voice. “And thank you for sending me away from there as you did.”

  “I take it you reached home safely, Madame?”

  She nodded, with a rueful smile. “More safely than I deserved. I walked for a few streets and found a hack and was home before eight-thirty. I … I realize it was foolish of me to think … to think I could speak to her there. I’d sent her messages before, you see. She never answered.”

  “So she said.”

  Her mouth tightened, remembered anger transforming the smooth full shape of the lips into something bitterly ugly and unforgiving.

  January remembered what Angelique had said about “little Creole tricks” and his mother’s stories about wives who’d used the city’s Black Code to harass their husbands’ mistresses. For a moment Mme. Trepagier looked perfectly capable of having another woman arrested and whipped on a trumped-up charge of being “uppity” to her—though God knew Angelique was uppity, to everyone she met, black or colored or white—or jailed for owning a carriage or not covering her hair.