A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  “What, and miss a duel?” As usual for this hour of the morning the fiddler looked as if he’d been pulled through a sieve, but his dark eyes sparkled with irony. “The single, solitary chance of an entire lifetime to see a Creole and an American actually taking potshots at each other? Heaven forfend.” He raised the backs of his fingers to his forehead in the manner of a diva quailing before circumstances too awful to endure. “It’s all a matter of timing,” he explained and went back to the dregs of his coffee.

  “When now Aurora, daughter of the dawn,

  With rosy luster purpled o’er the lawn …

  “The very hour, my friends, when the sporting establishments in the Swamp customarily close their doors and disgorge the flatboat crews into the—er—I suppose I have to call it a street. They’ll still be drunk, but not drunk enough yet to pass out, and they don’t go back to work until sunrise. If I come along to the duel I only have to worry about one bullet.”

  “I like to see a man who is provident as well as talented.” Mayerling nodded gravely, then held out a gloved hand to January. “Thank you again for agreeing to accompany us. It’s a nuisance, and cuts into your rest—and mine, I might add—but they seem to think their manhood will fall off in the dirt if they are deprived of the chance at least to put their lives in danger to prove the veracity of their claims. You’re familiar with their quarrel?”

  “Only that it’s the biggest shouting match since that last mayoral election when the editors of the Argus and the Courier got into that fistfight in the Café Hewlett,” said Hannibal cheerfully.

  “I gather Granger started out by accusing Bouille of deliberately voting against the proposed streetcar route of his LaFayette company in favor of another one that he says would favor the French population.”

  January finished the last scrap of beignet, and he and Hannibal followed the Prussian through the clutter of tables and patrons toward the street. “Bouille came back saying Granger was only angry because he, Bouille, hadn’t accepted the bribes offered by the LaFayette and Pontchartrain railway, and from there they went on to accuse each other of cowardice, bastardy, enticing young girls to run away from convents in order to lead them to ruin, infamous personal habits, and accepting a slap in the face from the mayor without demanding retribution.”

  January tucked his music satchel under his arm and sprang lightly across the gutter, the weight of his black leather medical bag a weirdly familiar ballast in his hand.

  “I am armed with more than complete steel,” quoted Hannibal expansively. “The justice of my quarrel.”

  “My mother says she can’t believe Bouille didn’t accept whatever bribes Granger was handing out because Bouille’s palm is greasier than a candlemaker’s apron, but that Granger makes his money stealing cows in St. Charles Parish and selling them back to their owners, so what does he care about his silly streetcar line anyway? I’d forgotten,” he added reminiscently, “how much I loved New Orleans politics.”

  The sword master gave him a quick grin. “Better than Balzac, no? I am a peaceful soul … no, it’s true,” he added, seeing January’s eyebrows shoot up. “Fighting is either for joy, or for death—to push and test yourself against your friend, or to end the encounter as quickly as possible so that your enemy does not get up again, ever. This silliness …” He waved a dismissive hand, as they dodged through the early traffic of carts and drays and handbarrows in the flickering oil-lit darkness of Rue du Levée.

  Mayerling’s students were waiting for them around the corner on Rue Condé, clustered beside a chaise and a barouche. It was a smaller group than had formed his court at the quadroon ball, but the faces were much the same. The red Elizabethan costume was familiar and the rather sissified Uncas; a blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe and a corsair who looked as if he’d be more familiar with the interior of a jewelry shop than the deck of a pirate vessel. City Councilman Jean Bouille had eschewed his Renaissance trunk hose in favor of evening dress and a crimson domino. January wondered if this had something to do with uneasiness about the possible dignity of his corpse.

  “Come to watch the show?” January asked, as he, Mayerling, and Bouille got into the chaise. He stowed his medical bag under his feet—the usual collection of cupping glasses, calomel, opium, and red pepper. At least, he thought, this would be a straightforward matter of wounds, bleeding, possibly broken bones. The four revelers piled into the barouche and dragged Hannibal in after them, all plying him in turn with their flasks, to be rewarded with an impassioned recitation of Byron’s “Destruction of Sennacherib,” as the vehicles pulled forward.

  “They have come to witness justice being done against a perjured and impotent Kaintuck swine,” declared Bouille, with comparative mildness and restraint, for him. “For me, I am glad of their presence. I would not put it past that infamous yellow hound to appear with a gang of like-minded bravos and ambush us, for he knows well he cannot prevail honestly in a man’s combat.”

  Mayerling only raised his colorless brows.

  Crowded close against him—the single seat of the two-wheeled chaise barely accommodated three people at the best of times, and only the Prussian’s slightness made it possible for a man of January’s size to fit—January said softly, “Young Peralta’s taking it hard, isn’t he? Mademoiselle Crozat’s death.”

  The strange eyes cut to him, then away.

  “It takes a lot to make a Creole absent himself from backing a friend’s honor.”

  “The boy is a fool to mourn,” said Mayerling, his voice cold. “The woman was evil, a poisonous succubus with a cashbox for a heart. Whoever he marries will have cause to thank the person who wielded that scarf.”

  January glanced in surprise at the ivory profile. “I didn’t know you knew her.” He remembered the way the Roman had lurked and lingered in the ballroom, the way masculine conversation stopped when she appeared, like a glittering idol of diamonds, in the ballroom doorway, the way all men had clustered around her.

  Except, now that he thought back on it, Mayerling.

  “Everyone in this city knows everyone,” replied the sword master. “Trepagier was one of my students. Did you not know?” He returned his attention to the road.

  The duel itself went as such things customarily did. The two carriages followed the Esplanade to the leaden, cypress-hung waters of Bayou St. John, and as dawn slowly bleached, the mists reached a patch of open ground on the Allard plantation, near the bayou’s banks, overshadowed with oaks the girth of a horse’s body.

  Granger, too, had decided against the possibility of being carried dead back to his family in the white baggy costume of Pierrot, and had worn evening dress instead. His second, however, still sported the gleaming pasteboard armor of the Roman legions, while the purple pirate with his unfortunate copper-colored beard held the heads of their phaeton’s team. Both Granger and Bouille, January noticed, wore dark coats whose buttons were noticeably small and inconspicuous.

  Mayerling produced the pistols, a pair of his own Mantons that Jenkins and the blue-and-yellow Ivanhoe examined minutely. While the fencing master loaded the pistols, the seconds made a last effort—albeit a fairly perfunctory one—to talk their principals out of battle: January heard Granger state loudly, “Were I not given the opportunity to sponge away this impudent crapaud’s bilious spewings in blood I would be forced to reenact the final scenes of Macbeth upon his verminous person.” A remark clearly intended for Bouille’s ears since Granger, an American speaking to two other Americans, said it in French.

  Bouille replied—to his own seconds, but in loud English—that he had no fear of “a canaille who can no more pass himself for a gentleman than our surgeon can pass himself for a white man. One cannot pretend to be what one is not.”

  And January, standing next to Mayerling, saw the sword master’s ironic smile. Bouille, that champion of Creole culture, like Livia Levesque, had evidently forgotten that he’d fled a typesetter’s job in France ahead of a couple of sordid lawsuits and a welter of bad debts. M
ulattos were not the only ones to suffer amnesia on horseback.

  January and Hannibal prudently retired to the shelter of the oak trees fifty feet away. Mayerling, with what January considered reckless confidence in both men’s aim, remained where he was. “You going to bleed whoever gets hit?” inquired Hannibal irreverently, leaning his chin on a horizontal bough.

  January nodded. “And purge them. Two or three times.”

  “Couldn’t happen to more deserving men.”

  There were two loud reports. Egrets squawked in the misty bayou.

  January peered around the deep-curved limbs of the tree in time to see William Granger stalk back to his phaeton and climb in. Bouille was expostulating to the little cluster of fencing students.

  “You see?” the city councilman crowed triumphantly. “The coward has outsmarted himself! In fear of my marksmanship he selected an impossible distance—fifty feet—at which he himself could not hit the door of a barn! Myself, I saw the shoulder of his coat rent asunder by my bullet.”

  While the exultant Bouille and his fellow pupils toasted one another and Hannibal with more hip flask brandy, Mayerling, with the air of a naturalist in quest of a new species of moth, paced off the spot where Granger stood and searched the surrounding trees until he found the bullet. Given even the most flattering estimate of its trajectory, it would have missed the American by yards. “More work in the gallery,” he said to Bouille, returning like the ghost of another century through the knee-deep ground mist, white ruff and sleeves pale in the dawn gloom. “Or less at your writing desk.”

  They climbed into the vehicles once again.

  The entire colored demimonde, past and present, turned out for Angelique’s funeral, Euphrasie Dreuze weeping in too-tight weeds and covered with veils that hid her face and trailed to her knees. From his position at the organ of the mortuary chapel of St. Antoine, January counted and tallied them: The chapel itself was small, but the overwhelmingly female audience did not overcrowd its hard wooden pews. In New Orleans’ climate of fevers and family ties there were few women who didn’t possess mourning dresses, but January was aware that if Angelique had been better liked many of those tricked out in well-fitting plum- and tobacco-colored silks would have worn black even if it didn’t show off their figures. Few women of color looked really good in black.

  As the pallbearers—handsome if embarrassed-looking young men, Angelique’s surviving brothers and two cousins—slid the coffin past the hanging curtain and into the oven tomb in the upstream wall of the cemetery, Madame Dreuze threw herself full-length on the ground before it, sobbing loudly.

  “Oh, Madame,” whispered Clemence Drouet, dropping to her knees beside her, “do not yield that way! You know that Angelique …” She was one of very few clothed in black, which did nothing for the ghastly pallor that underlay her warm, mahogany-red coloring. Her eyes were swollen, and tears had left gray streaks in the crepe of her bodice.

  “Phrasie, get up,” said Livia Levesque calmly. “You’re going to trip the priest.”

  Euphrasie permitted herself to be raised to her feet by the younger of her two sons.

  “There is no justice,” she cried, in ringing tones. “That Woman used witchcraft to murder my girl, and no one will do anything to bring her to her just deserts.” She turned toward the assembled group, the beautiful veiled ladies of the Rue des Ramparts, their servants, and a scattering of the merchants who served them. They stood crowded close, for the tombs rose up around them like a little marble village, tight-packed as the French town itself. January reflected that one didn’t have far to seek for the source of Angelique’s penchant for theatrics.

  “I told that dirty policeman how it was! Told him about the injustices That Woman had perpetrated on my innocent, before she hounded her to death! And he as much as told me they weren’t going to investigate, they weren’t going to prosecute … they weren’t going to lift a finger to avenge my child!”

  She threw back her veils to display a puffy, tear-sodden face framed by large earrings of onyx and jet, an enormous gold crucifix on her black silk breast. Obviously reveling in the role of tragedy queen, she turned to January, her lace-mitted hands clasped before her. “Ben, for the love of your own sweet mother, help me bring That Woman to justice, who witched my girl and brought down death on her. I beg you.”

  “What?” said January, horrified. Lack of sleep slowed him down, and the delay was fatal; Euphrasie stepped forward and enveloped him in a heavily scented embrace and laid her head on his breast. He stared wildly around him, at Euphrasie’s friends, his mother’s friends, all gazing at him as if waiting for him to agree to the absurd demand.

  Then Livia’s voice cut the silence. “Phrasie, don’t ask my son to do anything for love of me. Just because somebody put a piece of voodoo trash in your daughter’s bed doesn’t mean her death has the smallest thing to do with her man’s wife, much less does it give you leave to drag poor Ben into what isn’t his business, or yours either.”

  “It is my business!” Euphrasie whirled, drawing back from January but keeping a hold on his hands. “My only child’s murder is my business! Bringing the murderess to justice is my business! That policeman—that American—would let That Woman get away with the crime as if she’d strangled her with her own two hands—which I’m not sure even now she didn’t do!”

  “Madame Dreuze—” bleated the priest.

  “Tell him.” Madame Dreuze’s plump finger, glittering with a diamond the size of a pigeon’s eye, stabbed at Dominique, and the jewel sparkled in the gray winter light. “Tell him what you got this afternoon! Tell him about the note from that policeman—that illiterate Kaintuck usurper!—that the police have no further need of your testimony, of anyone’s testimony, because they’re not going to take the matter further!”

  Shocked, January’s eyes went to Minou, beautiful in exquisitely cut spinach-green silk with sleeves that stuck out a good twelve inches per side. “Is that true?”

  She hesitated for a long minute—probably out of a general unwillingness to agree with anything Euphrasie Dreuze said—then nodded. “Yes. He didn’t say in so many words the investigation was being dropped, but I can read between the lines.”

  “Well, I won’t have it!” Euphrasie threw up her arms, as if pleading with heaven, and her bulging eyes fixed on January. “I won’t have it! My daughter must be avenged, and if you won’t do it, Benjamin January, I will find someone who will!”

  NINE

  “Oh, Ben, don’t tell me you’re actually surprised!”

  “Of course I’m surprised!” January dished greens onto Minou’s plate, and jambalaya, and handed it to her where she sat at the table, barely conscious of what he did. He wasn’t merely surprised but deeply troubled.

  Beyond the tall windows of Dominique’s exquisite dining room, the small light that got past the wall and rooflines of the houses behind them was fading, though it was barely six. Knowing he’d have to be out at a ball in the Saint Mary faubourg for most of the night, January had slept a few hours after the funeral, but his dreams had been unsettling. When he came down to the kitchen, Dominique was there, an apron over the spinach-green silk, sleeves rolled up, helping Bella and Hannibal wash up tea things. “Mama’s over at Phrasie’s,” she said. “I told Bella I’d get you supper.”

  “You’ve been in Paris too long,” said Hannibal. He raised his wine glass to Dominique in what was mostly a respectful salute to his hostess but partly a flirtation. She caught his eye and returned him her most melting smile.

  “Or not long enough.” January returned to the table.

  “You really thought the police would investigate the murder of a colored woman if the leading suspects were all white?”

  January was silent, feeling the heat of embarrassment rise through him and disgust at himself for the trust he’d felt in the law, in the police, in the Kaintuck officer Shaw. He had, he thought, in fact been in Paris too long. Law-abiding as he was in his soul, it had taken him years
to learn to trust authority there.

  “What did the note say?” he asked in time. “Because you have to admit, Madame Dreuze’s story about Madame Trepagier sending a confederate to plant hoodoo hexes under her rival’s mattress isn’t something I’d care to take into court.”

  “Oh, that …” His sister made a dismissive gesture. “Everybody in that crowd knew perfectly well that Madame Trepagier tried to swear out a writ late yesterday afternoon to stop the sale of the jewelry and the two slaves, and Madame Dreuze spent the whole morning at Heidekker and Stein’s, peddling every fragment, dress, and stick of furniture. Why else do you think Phrasie was carrying on so? She had to cover up. God knows anybody who causes Euphrasie Dreuze inconvenience has got to be the Devil’s in-law. Just ask her.”

  “I had a wife like that once,” remarked Hannibal, dreamy reminiscence in his eye. “Maybe more than one. I forget.”

  Minou rapped him on the arm with her spoon. “Bad man! But no, Ben. It wasn’t that.”

  She rose and crossed to the sideboard where the covered dishes of greens and jambalaya, the rolls, and the wine stood ready, and from a drawer took a half a piece of yellow foolscap, folded small. Hannibal got to his feet and held her chair for her when she returned; she looked as surprised as she would have had her brother performed this gentlemanly office, then smiled at him again, and seated herself in a gentle froufrou of skirts. January had watched his sister at the Blue Ribbon Balls enough to know that, without being unfaithful to Henri Viellard in thought, word, or deed, she always had that effect on men. Certainly, to judge by the warm solicitousness of her eyes, Hannibal was having his customary effect on Minou.