A Free Man of Color

by Barbara Hambly

  The note was written in the labored hand of one who has acquired the discipline of orthography late and incompletely. At least, thought January dourly, it wasn’t tobacco stained.

  February 16 1833

  Mis January:

  Regarding the notes which I askt you to make last Thursday night, many thanks for yor efort and time. It apears now, however, that they will not be necesary, and I would take it as a grate favor if you would put them aside in some safe place where they will not be seen. My deepest apolagys for puting you to the trouble of making them.

  Yr o’bt s’vt, Abishag Shaw

  She was only a plaçée, after all.

  January’s hand shook with anger as he set the paper down.

  “An American,” he said softly. “We should have known better than to look for more.”

  Minou was silent, turning the tall crystal wine glass in her fingers. Henri Viellard was a good provider: The cottage on Rue Burgundy was decorated with expensive simplicity, the table china French, the crystal German. When first he had entered the house last November, January had immediately guessed that the podgy young man had simply given his mistress carte blanche. If tonight’s simple meal was anything to go by, her choice of a cook was in keeping with the rest of the establishment—and possibly, though Viellard wouldn’t have admitted it, the real attraction of the ménage.

  It was not the house of a prostitute, not the house of a woman who sold herself to a man. It was the home of a couple who would have been married had the Black Code not forbidden it, the home of a woman whose man was prevented by law from living with her. The home of that curiously nuanced class of individual, a free plaçée of color.…

  Whom Americans like Shaw would see only as nigger whores.

  With a certain amount of effort he kept his voice even. “Do you have the notes?”

  Hannibal was out of his chair and helping her rise before January could make even a belated move in that direction. Thérèse, the servant woman, entered in silence and cleared away plates and serving dishes as Dominique extracted a thick mass of yellow foolscap from yet another drawer in the sideboard, and in equal silence brought coffee things and a little pale brown sugar in a French porcelain bowl.

  “So far as I can tell,” said Dominique, spreading the papers as the men cleared the cups to one side, “these are the people who were at the ball, and next door in the Théâtre d’Orléans. I checked with all my friends, and all their friends, and we figured out even the Americans and decided who had to be at least some of the people in the other ballroom.… We know Henri’s family had to be there, for instance, because that awful mother of his never lets him go out without taking her and his sisters and Aunt Francine, and we know Pauline Mazanat and the Pontchartrain Trepagiers had to be there because they’re the heads of the subscription committee that was running the ball.… That kind of thing.”

  Her long, slim fingers shuffled neatly through the pile of foolscap scribbled with Shaw’s uneven lines and the guardsman’s pinched hand, sorting them out from the scented buff sheets of her own notepaper.

  “The only ones we’re not sure of were the men downstairs in the gambling rooms, but of course without tickets, they weren’t allowed up the stairs. You can be sure Agnes Pellicot knew exactly who was asking her about her daughters. Can you believe that awful Henry VIII with his six wives is a man named Hubert Granville who’s been talking to Françoise Clisson about her daughter Violette?”

  “Were all those six wives his?” asked Hannibal, interested.

  “Oh, no.” Dominique laughed, and ticked them off on her fingers. “One of them was Bernadette Métoyer, who knows him through her bank—he’s the president of the Union Bank and he lent her the money to set up her chocolate business when Athanase de Soto paid her off. Two of them were her sisters who help her in the chocolate shop, one was Marie Toussainte Valcour—Philippe Cournand, her protector, had to attend his grandmother’s dinner that night—one was Marie-Eulalie Figes, who is plaçée to Philippe’s cousin, and he had to dance attendance on Grandma Cournand as well, and one was Marie-Eulalie’s younger sister Babette. Marie-Eulalie is trying to come to an understanding for Babette with Jean duBose.”

  With that kind of intelligence system in operation among the plaçées and their families, January no longer doubted the accuracy or completeness of Dominique’s lists. Names were appended in Dominique’s small, flowery hand to all the witnesses who had remained to testify, and to all but perhaps twenty of the costumes listed by various persons as “seen.” Among those “seen,” January was unsettled to note, was “Indian Princess.” And she had been seen by at least three people in the upstairs lobby after the music had started playing.

  Damn, thought January. The charge that she could have had anything to do with Angelique Crozat’s death was ridiculous, but Madame Trepagier had put herself in serious trouble by remaining. Why had she come upstairs after he’d told her to leave? Even without a ticket, a costumed woman could have slipped past the ushers, who were only there to keep out drunks and chance strangers from the gambling rooms. But it was, after all, a Blue Ribbon Ball.

  Had she had second thoughts? Something else she had to tell him and was later prevented?

  Had she decided to seek out Angelique herself?

  In either case, she had lied to him Friday morning when she said she had gone directly back to Les Saules.

  I was home by eight-thirty, she had said.

  Why the lie?

  He scanned the rest of the list.

  There were only three other women unaccounted for, “seen” but not identified: “lavender domino,” “green-striped odalisque,” and “gypsy.” “Creole girls spying on their husbands,” said Dominique offhandedly, when January asked.

  “Silly.” She returned his look of surprise with the warm flicker of her smile. “You don’t think Creole ladies sometimes try to sneak in and see what their menfolk are up to? We can spot them a mile away. I understand why they want to do that,” she added more soberly. “And I … I feel sorry for them, even the ones who complain to the police if you go to a restaurant or buy dresses that are too fine. But what good will it do, to see your husband with a woman you already know in your heart exists? It only hurts more. But most of them don’t think about that till later.”

  January remembered himself, standing on the banquette opposite Catherine Clisson’s house all those hot nights of his youth and shook his head. It did only hurt more. And he knew that it was a rare man, white or black or colored, who would truly give up a mistress because of the pleading or nagging of a wife. They simply hid them deeper or put them aside for a while only to go back.

  He turned the lists over in his fingers, the scribbled and amended and much-crossed chronology of the evening, arranged, he was interested to note, like a dance card, by what songs were being played. Minou’s dance card from the evening was included in the bundle—with every dance taken, naturally—and even Shaw’s original questions were linked to what music was being played.

  Dominique must have suggested it to him. He spelled waltz, “walce.”

  No one had seen Galen Peralta after he’d stormed downstairs following his initial spat with Angelique.

  “Was there ever anything between Augustus Mayerling and Angelique?”

  Dominique trilled with laughter. “Mayerling? Good heavens, no! He hated Angelique almost from the day they met.”

  The woman who marries him will have cause to thank the one who wielded that scarf.

  “Because of the way she treated young Peralta?”

  “If Trepagier and the Peralta boy were both his students,” pointed out Hannibal, “it’s my guess that’s how Angelique met our boy Galen to begin with. Augustus would have had a front-row seat on the whole seduction from the first dropped handkerchief, meanwhile watching her take Arnaud for every cent he had. His … antipathy … could have been as much disgust as hatred. He’s fastidious about things like that.”

  Hardly a reason for murder, t
hought January, no matter how fond he was of Galen Peralta. But now that he thought of it, Augustus Mayerling had been absent from the ballroom for far longer than would be accounted for by the conference over the duel.

  Four dances—slightly under an hour—had intervened between Bouille’s challenge and Mayerling’s reappearance to ask January to preside as physician over the duel. During those dances—the most popular of the evening—the lobby had been almost deserted. For the same reason, none of Dominique’s friends had been willing to absent themselves from the ballroom no matter what portions of their tableau costumes remained unfinished. Galen, storming out of the building, had been smitten with l’esprit d’escalier and had gone back to renew his quarrel with Angelique, ascending by the service stair. If Clemence had gone after him down the main stair, she would have missed him. He had presumably departed the same way, and the murderer could have entered quietly from the lobby.

  Always assuming, of course, that Galen was not the murderer himself.

  “Those names on the last page?” Dominique reached over his shoulder to tap the papers. “Those are the people—Thank you, Thérèse.” She smiled at the maid who came in to refill the coffee cups. “Those are the people we know were there that weren’t on Lt. Shaw’s list, so they must have left either before the murder or just after it, or sneaked out before Shaw could speak to them. Catherine Clisson was one of the ones who sneaked out—or Octave Motet did and insisted she go with him because if anyone recognized her, they’d know he’d been there, too. He’s the president of the Banque de Louisiane; he doesn’t dare let his name be connected with anything like this. Do you think Galen Peralta was the one who did it? Strangled Angelique, I mean?”

  January moved the papers again, studied the lists—who saw whom during the jig and reel, during the Rossini waltz, during the progressive waltz, during the Lancers. Josette Noyelle—Aphrodite in the Greek tableau—had gone into the parlor during the progressive waltz and hadn’t seen Angelique then. After the Rossini waltz Dominique had been searching for Angelique, in and out of that room, frequently encountering other friends there as they put up each other’s hair, repaired trodden hems, changed or finished costumes for the tableaux.

  Only one person—Dominique herself—noted Clemence Drouet’s presence at the ball at all. Clemence was that kind of woman. She’d arrived at Angelique’s house the following morning in the expectation of seeing her alive, so she must in fact have left the building between her brief encounter with January, just before the quarrel, and the discovery of Angelique’s corpse.

  And of course, no one had bothered to notify her.

  The American Tom Jenkins had clearly been searching as well, if he’d left a laurel leaf in the parlor, but unless he was far cleverer than he looked, he wouldn’t have kept searching if he knew she was lying dead at the bottom of an armoire.

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “On the face of it, I’d say yes.… Except for his age. He’s young, and he was crazy possessed by her, even before Trepagier died, I’ve heard. I’m not sure he’d have had the wits to hide the body and strip her jewelry to make it look like robbery. If he’d killed her, I think he’d have been found by the body.”

  “You’d be surprised what you do when you have to,” pointed out Hannibal, warming his small, rather delicate-looking hands over the coffee cup’s aromatic steam. The light had faded from the windows, and Thérèse came in with a taper to light the branches of candles on sideboard, table, and walls. The gold gleam lent color to the fiddler’s bloodless features, banishing the dissipated pallor and camouflaging the frayed cuffs and threadbare patches of the black evening coat that hung so slack over his thin shoulders.

  “For all he follows Augustus around like a puppy, he wasn’t at the duel this morning, and I’m told he didn’t attend the Bringiers’ ball last night. Not something his father would have let him miss.”

  “No,” said January thoughtfully, leafing through the papers again. “No.”

  Columbines, Pierrots, Chinese Emperors, Ivanhoes had filled the upstairs lobby and downstairs entry hall; Uncases and Natty Bumpoes (Bumpi?, wondered January, recollecting his Latin lessons); Sultans and Greek gods. Men in evening dress and dominoes. Women in unidentifiable garments described by Shaw’s laboring clerk as “lace with high collar, violet sash, pearls on sleeves” (except Livia would have pointed out those were not genuine pearls), to which Dominique’s more regular hand had appended “lilac princess—Cresside Morisset—w/Denis Saint-Roche (mother/fiancée in Théâtre).”

  Out of curiosity, January asked, “Is Peralta Fils engaged to anyone?” The woman who marries him …

  “Rosalie Delaporte,” reported Dominique promptly. “The Delaportes are cousins to the Dupages, and there was a big party at Grandpère Dupage’s town house on Rue Saint Louis. All of them were there.”

  Jig/reel—Hubert Granville w/Marie-Eulalie Figes, Yves Valcour w/Iphègénie Picard, Martin Clos w/Phlosine Seurat … Marie-Toussainte Valcour and Bernadette Métoyer saw red/white Ivanhoe by buffet … green Elizabethan by doors …

  He looked again. At least six people had seen “gold Roman” in the ballroom during the Rossini waltz. He’d been William Granger’s second for the duel, and thus in Froissart’s office at the bottom of the service stair. Xavier Peralta, who’d also been there, hadn’t put in a reappearance until almost the end of the progressive waltz, nearly ten minutes later.

  He remembered the old man in the night-blue satin, talking long and earnestly with Euphrasie Dreuze, watching the crowds in the lobby, in the ballroom, looking for someone.

  He, if not his son, would have had the measure of the cat-faced woman dressed like the Devil’s bride. He would have watched that come-hither scene with Jenkins, watched her eyes, her body, as she teased and laughed among the men; watched his son following her, crazy in love. Not being stupid, he would already have asked his friends about her.

  A valuable piece of downtown property, a substantial sum monthly, and all the jewels, dresses, horses, and slaves she could coax out of a lovestruck seventeen-year-old boy.

  The woman who marries him …

  A poisonous succubus with a cashbox for a heart.

  The meeting in Froissart’s office could have continued with Granger and Bouille, of course, after the seconds were dismissed. And Shaw was the only one who would know that.

  January folded the papers together, gazing out sightlessly into the early dark. Euphrasie Dreuze’s ravings about the dead bat aside, it was quite possible that Lt. Shaw had looked over his notes and come to his own conclusions about just who had the most motive in Angelique Crozat’s death: the passionate son, or that powerful, courtly, white-bearded old man.

  Maybe he only remembered with the memory of an idealistic young man, but it was his recollection that sixteen years ago, before he left Louisiana, had a white man murdered a free colored woman, the police would have investigated and the murderer been hanged. It had been a French city then, with the French understanding of who, and what, the free colored actually were: a race of not-quite-acknowledged cousins, neither African nor European, but property holders, artisans, citizens.

  Shaw had, for a time, appeared to understand. But that was before he’d read these notes.

  There was a difference between not quite trusting whites, and this. Being struck in the street had not been as shocking, or as painful, as the realization of what exactly the American regime meant.

  “ ‘Put them aside,’ ” he quoted dryly, handing the folded sheets back to Dominique, “ ‘in some safe place where they will not be seen.’ It looks like this isn’t any of our business anymore.”

  And so the matter rested, until Euphrasie Dreuze took matters into her own grasping little ring-encrusted hands.

  TEN

  They were all raised to this world, he had said to Madeleine Trepagier three nights ago, with the bands of greasy light falling through the window of Froissart’s office onto her masked and painted face. To do things a certain w
ay. They mostly know each other, and they all know the little tricks—who they can talk to and who not …

  January shook his head ironically at the memory of his words as he lounged up Rue DuMaine, with the lazy, almost conversational tapping of African drums growing louder before him beyond the iron palings of the fence around Congo Square.

  You don’t. Go home, he had said. Go home right now.

  Even with his papers in his pocket—the pocket of the shabby corduroy roundabout he’d bought for a couple of reales from a backstreet slop shop in the Irish Channel—he felt a twinge of uneasiness as he crossed the Rue des Ramparts.

  Last night he had said to Dominique, This isn’t any of our business anymore.

  Now who’s being a fool?

  He slipped his hand in his pocket, fingering the papers with a kind of angry distaste. Before he’d left for Paris, sixteen years ago, the assumption of his status had been unquestioned. He was a free man—black, white, or tea, as Andrew Jackson had said when he’d recruited him to fight the redcoats at Chalmette. He had been shocked when the official at the docks had looked at him oddly, and said, “Returnin’ resident, eh? You might want to get yourself papers, boy. They’s enough cheats and scum in this city who’d pounce on a likely lookin’ boy, and you’d find yourself pickin’ cotton in Natchez before you kin say Jack Robinson. Till you do, I’d stay out of barrooms.”

  He had grown up being called “boy” by white men, even as a grown man. It was something he’d half forgotten, like his wariness of authority. In any case what one accepts as a twenty-four-year-old musician is different from what one expects when one is forty and a member of the Paris College of Surgeons, though he hadn’t practiced in ten years. But that at least was something he’d thought about on the boat from Le Havre.

  His mother had confirmed that these days a man of color, no matter how well dressed and well spoken, needed to carry proof of his freedom—and a slave of his business—in order to walk the streets alone.